More prizes up for grabs!

First off, something I forgot to mention last time. When I was in Bujumbura last weekend, I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt saying “Made in Salisbury” - made me chuckle to myself. Continuing the shoelace theme (the prizes are still up for grabs by the way), I found a novel use for an ADSL (internet) cable that I bought with me. It's now outside, but will only be used occasionally, and not if it is raining – any idea what it's doing? I'm working on where the coffee is going to come from – we might buy some cherries off the lady in my last post and process it ourselves, but there is also a 10 hectare island of organic coffee too, which I quite fancy. I guess I'll bring back both a bit of both! We've finally been able to make coffee at home this week (photo below as promised NOW DONE!) – we don't have a kettle, but we do have a filter machine instead, but we don't have any filter papers for it! Instead we use the machine to boil water and then use a cool gadget of Mario's to make the coffee. It's essentially a 21st cafetiere and is very effective – like a large syringe with a filter paper at one end, that you add coffee too and then hot water, leave for a few minutes and then add a plunger too and push through into your mug.

Went to the last farms that we're working with on Thursday. They were in the North, so I've now seen three corners of the country. Coffee isn't grown in the north-east, but I should hopefully visit there as you can go on safari! On my first visit to farms I spotted that something was causing the young leaves on coffee plants to roll up really tightly. I couldn't find anything inside them then, but I obviously didn't look closely enough as I've now worked out it is caused by thrips - they are only 1-2 mm long, so I don't feel too bad for missing them the first time round! We've seen them (some species of Hoplandothrips, but no idea which) in almost every plantation we've visited, and yet I can't find anything more than one paragraph of information about them. That says they don't cause much damage, but coffee only produces flowers on last years growth, and as they attack the new leaves, it can hardly be helping! (this post, will be the second google hit for Hoplandothrips in Rwanda)

Here are the curled leaves:

And one of the little critters (I had to squash it a bit to stop it running around, so I could get a photo. Sorry.):

There's been a bit of a change of plan this week, as SPREAD recently found out that they are not receiving a lot of money that they thought they were going to be. I'll still be doing work on coffee, but am also going to be working with a company producing pyrethrum (sopywra), a natural insecticide that's produced from chrysanthemum flowers. SPREAD already have a project running with the producer, but there are also some students from the National University of Rwanda (here in Butare) that are going to be running experiments on chrysanthemum and pyrethrum. Mario's company are interested in using pyrethrum to control pests of coffee, as you can produce it organically and then use it on organic plantations. To be honest I think that it's stupid that the pyrethrum needs to be produced organically. We visited the factory on Friday and it goes though so many purification steps that there is no way the final product could be contaminated. There are 70,000 chrysanthemum farmers, so certifying them will be a massive task and they grow potatoes close by which are definitely not organic A British company are building a factory to turn the processed pyrethrum into an insecticide, so it doesn't have to be shipped somewhere and bought back, and obviously meaning more cash stays here. Anyway, I digress, I'm going to be helping the students to design their experiments, they've already done so, but most need a lot of work to make them produce any useful data. Got meetings with some of them tomorrow, might be a hard slog – already helped one student who's working on composting coffee pulp and it took about 2 hours to explain the problems and the solutions.

Here's the pymethrum factory:

I mentioned before that I had met a German guy who composts his own wastes. Well it turns out that apparently, if you add the right amount of wood shavings (to raise the carbon:nitrogen ratio), you can have a bucket in your room and it doesn't smell. I'm slightly sceptical, but considering humans expel something like 5 kg of nitrogen a year, if he's right it would be a pretty awesome source of fertiliser (35 million tonnes of N!). His other interest is terra pretta – adding charcoal to soil. It was used a lot by in the Amazon thousands of years ago, because charcoal has a huge surface area which traps nutrients. In really old soils, like those found in much of the tropics, it should really improve the soil and decrease pollution. Mario (housemate) was already going to be trying to get some experiments with it going here as he has previously used it on coffee plantations in Panama. I linked them together and we had a meeting over some beers to discuss things and hopefully we will get some plots going soon. Jan (the German) is here on his own cash, but has set up 74 plots of soybeans, using different amounts of terra pretta. The plants are still quite young but we went to see them on Thursday and it's already clear which are the controls and which have the most terra pretta, which is promising. Currently, he'll have to go back to Germany in June, as he'll run out of money, but hopefully we can work out a way for Mario's company to buy terra pretta off him so he can stay. There's been a fair bit of noise in the west about terra pretta in recent years as a potential way to sequester carbon in soils. Whether that would work in the long term is still unclear, but more of a problem is that our charcoal industry is tiny, unlike here where it is huge. Jan's ambition is to “turn Rwanda black” - I hope he's successful!

Here's Jan with some compost:

Really starting to miss decent bread (is it bad that that's the thing I miss most?). Bread here is sweet, stale and not gluteny like in England. I guess it's because they don't use decent flour, but as I was thinking the other day about how good a good cheese sandwich and a pint of pig's ear would be... I'm fairly used to having rice, goat kebabs and lager instead though, and it only costs the same as the beer at home!

Turned into a bit of a monster post. Let me know if there's anything I haven't talked about that you want to know about Rwanda.