Two steps forward, one-and-a-half back

Tenemos una versión en español aquí

In this edition of, what is it that she is doing with iguanas? I reveal a secret.

As you may already know, I use this blog to tell you about the development of our field experiment each week. The project continues to attempt to evaluate the effects of the green iguana on Puerto Rico's agricultural production, in this case of two crops. Enfasis on attempts. We have yet to achieve the goal of beginning this project, and this week an atmospheric event stopped us. It was the first storm of the hurricane season, Dorian.

Dorian, the first storm of the season.

Our plan for monday 26 of August was simple and complicated. These were the steps to be followed,

1. Leave San Juan at 5:00am to travel to Sabana Grande and pick up our lettuce and cucumber seedlings.

Plant nursery in Sabana Grande where I picked up my seedlings.

2. Take seedlings to Juana Diaz to begin planting them in our plots.

Here was the first speed bump, one among the many that this experiment has had. Here is where I reveal my secret to you. This experiment was SUPPOSED to start in MAY and end in AUGUST. There have been a series of unfortunate events that have made this an impossible reality. I'm not going to tell you about all of them, but I will tell you about the ones that occured this week.

The 1,000 plants that had to be creatively transported.

When I arrived at our farm in Juana Diaz, I noticed that I had neglected to indicate the treatment each plot would receive, remember this drawing? I decided that before telling them I had over 1,000 plants in the back of my car, that I should probably mark each plot in our site to indicated which treatment it would received... before planting anything. Particularly, we should put up the mesh fences that are meant to exclude green iguanas.

Among our three treatments, we have fences that should protect the plants.

Here is the second delay of that day, we didn't have enough people to both assemble the mesh fences and plant our seedlings in the same day. I know you are aware of the excellent Dream team but, since the experiment has been delayed, the students have returned to their classes which means we have gone from a team of three or four to a team of one. Me.

This is not to say that the incredible personnel from Juana Díaz wasn't there to help, but even with their expert help we weren't enough people. We spent the entire morning putting up 160 wooden stakes around the 20 plots that would be getting the mesh treatment. We decided to use the morning to put up our mesh and then the next day (Tuesday 27 of August) finally plant our seedlings. Yes ladies and gentlemen, we had to wait for the highly anticipated moment of planting our plants.

Abraham, who works for the Juana Diaz experimental station places the wooden stakes that will hold up the mesh around our plots.

And we continue to wait.

That monday 26 of August at 5:00am the forecast for tropical storm Dorian placed it at 40 miles, give or take, off the the coast of Cabo Rojo. But at 1:00pm, when we returned from lunch it now seemed like it would continue to get closer to Puerto Rico. It even seemed like the storm would enter through the south of the Island, right where Juana Diaz is.

In a matter of hours (the four we spent working) the outlook had changed so drastically that we decided not to plant anything. We opted to store our plants in a greenhouse at the Juana Diaz field station and try again on Thursday, we wanted the plants to survive the storm... that never came.

Dorian went from missing us, then going right through Puerto Rico and finally missing us by going just north of us (not that I'm complaining about not getting a storm). No one can see into the future, so we made the decision to prevent the sudden death of our plants that would have occurred had Dorian entered the island.

That's just how it goes.

Although Dorian was expected to pass through Puerto Rico on Wednesday, on Thursday the tail end of the storm brought with it so much rain that it was impossible to continue work on our plots. We then decided to come back the following Monday, but that turned out to be labor day. So we will get back to it on Tuesday the 3RD OF SEPTEMBER.

This is the wave we travel on dear reader, it is tropical, it's unpredictable and it comes with delays. Please light a candle so that our experiment might start. If you don't believe in lighting candles, please do whatever it is you believe in, it certainly can't hurt.