Getting ready to go

It was time to start thinking about leaving Israel--so that also meant it was time to start thinking about finishing up this experiment, which I guess is the primary reason I came over here




The first step was to get the biomass of all my plants measured. Although I had assumed correctly that it would be easier to get the density of my plants (i.e., count them all) as I clipped them for biomass weights, it still didn't make it easy.

Essentially what this job involved, was going through and clipping the plants stem by stem (with manicure scissors, and tweezers. If you've heard at all about my experiments, you'll know what common experimental implements these are for me). So I had to count the stems for each species, and then seperate them into bags....especially hard because these plants were so dry (they matured nearly instantly!) that when you touched them, the seeds would spring off....making the grasses that much harder to identify.

It was once I'd gotten all those big grasses out, and got down to a situation like this, that I started wishing for a tub full of grass again....sifted through a lot of leaves with tweezers, identifying small brown bits of plant.





Finally the job was finished though, all the plants clipped, and stress levels were dropping. All the plants were clipped, bagged and drying....We were finished with time to spare !




But knowing me, what does time to spare mean? Find something else to do! So, I decided to measure the below ground biomass as well...



Because the tubs all contain about 70 L of sand, and I didn't have all that much time to spare, I only collected the roots from a quarter of each tub (I was quite impressed with our ability to get only 1/4 of the sand out....took some skill I had to say.

So, the 20 L of sand from each tub (all 120 of them) was washed through a small screen and I collected all the roots. As you can see, it was pretty classy work.


But in the end, everything got finished, all the sand that I hauled in last year got hauled back out, tubs were cleaned, and the greenhouse left empty. My work here, and I guess my time for play here as well, is done...

Haifa for the weekend

I went to Haifa for the weekend, for one last trip to the north of Israel, before I headed back to the north of Canada. After spending very little of my last trip to Haifa last year actually in the city, we had vowed to spend more time seeing the sites inside the city.

So, we began this by going hiking.....outside the city.

We did see pretty cool things there though. We saw groups of caterpillars all following each other in a line...



They call this the "caterpillar train"



And also got to go hiking in some really nice areas, with vegetation cover and water--both of which you don't find so much hiking in the desert.



We made it back to the city for an evening tour of the city. We overlooked the harbour from just above the Bahai gardens (golden domed building in the centre).



The next morning we headed, you guessed it, back out of the city. This time we went to Tzipori, the ruins of a settlement over 2000 years old. It is thought to be a centre for Jewish learning after the temple was destroyed early in the first century . Some of the best preserved mosaics in Israel are found here.



Including the Mona Lisa of Galilee (it is actually referred to as this)...



You can see from the surroundings why they would pick this spot to build a settlement. It is higher up than all the surrounding lands, so you get a great panoramic view of the region.



We finally arrived back in the city, to spend the afternoon wandering around the old Arab section of Haifa.


We ended up finding a set of footprints painted on the sidewalks, and so, of course, decided to follow them. We couldnt' really figure out where we were going, or what the footprints were all about, but kept following them anyways. They eventually led us to the workshop of a man who fixes old wooden furniture. He explained to us that there had been an art walk through Haifa a few months before, and that the footprints were taking us past all kinds of art exhibitions (we had commented that there seemed to be a lot of artists living in this area, with all the art outside). So, we started over and followed through the footprints again, looking for the art this time. We had decided we thought they were all supposed to follow a coffee theme, but this one threw us off that track....