Germinating pollen??? Who knew!

This morning, Millie and I decided to make our own breakfasts again this morning. It was really good! Can't beat peanut butter on bread, a banana, and tea! :) Very good:)

Work was full of action today! Dr. Jean Hanson had Millie, Andreas, and I all head outside back to the tree (where we took the flower and seed pod samples last week) and gather a few more samples of flowers from the development stages where there were huge quantities of pollen. It looks so cool! The anthers are just full of hundreds of tiny golden colored grain of pollen! It is extremely fascinating to just look at for a whole day straight I'll admit. But anyway! After we gathered our samples, Millie dissected one of them just to make sure there was a lot of pollen on the flowers we picked, and we all took a look and guess what! POLLEN!!! Just oozing out of the anthers! (Okay well maybe not oozing, but there was a lot everywhere.)

A little while later, one of the chemists at ILRI took us back to the lab to make the solution for germinating. It had such difficult instructions and it was very challenging to figure and measure out the proper amounts of each compound. It took us over 2 hours to complete the mixture! Thanks Mr. Kremer for teaching me Chemistry and how to balance equations! It really came in handy today! The way we stirred the mixture was extremely fascinating! They have a stirring hotplate in the lab, so you put this magnetic, cylindrical-shaped bean (I don't know how to describe it) into the beaker, turn the "stir" knob to whatever level of speed you want, and voila! It's stirring without you even having to move a finger! (Sort of...)

Now that we have the solution all ready to use, it was time to germinate! We had to put 2 drops of sucrose (our mixture) on a slide, dissect the flower, gather some grains of pollen off the anthers, drop those onto the sucrose, put a cover slip on each sample, and put it in an incubator (we improvised and used a hotplate like surface) at 30 degrees Celsius. The proper time for this is to wait 3 hours for it to germinate, but it was getting close to the end of the day, so we only waited about 2 1/2 hours. When the 2 1/2 hours were up, we looked at the samples under a microscope to see the germinated pollen! There wasn't a huge amount that was pollinated but there was still quite a bit! It was very exciting to see! I don't think there was that much germination because we didn't wait the full 3 hours, and there was some human error in making the sucrose mixture. 

The slides with germinated pollen!
Sitting on the "incubator!"

Another picture of the slides

 Slightly before 5, Tigist came into the herbarium to see how we were all doing and to get Andreas to sign his internship contract. Millie and I told her that we were running extremely short on money and she just looked at us amazed. She said we were supposed to have been given part of our stipends at some point today! We didn't, and they wouldn't be ready until tomorrow, so until then, she lent us some more money... After work, Millie and I decided it was time to do some more walking around in Addis! We haven't done that since last Thursday! We did show Ricardo around on Saturday, but that wasn't just the 2 of us, so we decided that didn't count. :) We also wanted to make our own dinner tonight! It was so delicious! Simple, but a great, hostel-cooked meal:) (Can't really say home-cooked meal... haha...) We bought macaroni noodles, tomato paste (couldn't find spaghetti sauce), mushrooms, chickpeas, carrots, apples, and peas. We hurried back to our rooms as fast as we could because neither of us could wait to make it! We were so excited! :) It turned out great too! We cooked the noodles and heated up the tomato paste, chickpeas, and mushrooms and then mixed them all together and it was AMAZINGGGG!!! The carrots were huge carrots but had a great, fresh taste too. The apples... yum! Such amazing flavor! Oh! We also made some tea to drink! I love the tea here. I'm definitely going to bring some back! 

Me just cooking the noodles!

Our finished product! Dinner is served!

It was such a great day again today overall! It even rained again today! So nice:) That means planting is coming soon! Woo! Dr. Jean also handed Millie, Andreas, and I sheets of paper that had a list of the forages in the greenhouse that aren't producing seed. Three of them aren't flowering or producing seed, and 3 of them are producing flowering, but not producing seed. She told us we each had to pick one from the different categories and that would be our project we'd be working on and what our final presentation will be over! We're getting to the big stuff now! It's getting real! I'm so excited and can't wait to start researching about my 2 plants tomorrow!