Yesterday two people from Otago came in to teach the class about pūtaiao, (science) and the importance of harakeke and tīkouka. Their names were Tewharau and Marijn. (I think)
They taught us that our tupuna used harakeke and tīkouka to survive, they used it to make shoes, shin guards, sails, rope, rain coats, and food.
We got to go outside to harvest harakeke and tīkouka, but before we could harvest it we had to learn some rules about it. Before you harvest the plant you have to do a karakia to pay respects to Tane Mahuta, when you’re cutting the harakeke you have to cut it diagonally, cause when it rains if you cut it horizontally the rain will stay on the top of the cut part and it’ll eventually rot away. If you cut it diagonally the rain will slide off the harakeke and it won’t rot, cutting the harakeke this way allows it to regrow as well. Also, in a harakeke plant there’s the grandparents, parents and the baby, when harvesting you can only harvest the grandparents because the baby is the center of the plant so it’d kill the plant to harvest the baby.
We learnt that there’s stringy stuff inside harakeke called muka, muka is very durable and strong but we wanted to test how much weight it could hold, so we did a tensile test. We found out it could hold up to 28kg bucket of weight combined with water.
After that we learnt about the compounds inside harakeke and the processes, then we got to make our own glass sliders to look under microscopes. First we cut a bit of harakeke or tīkouka, then we put it in the slit of a potato and cut the excess, next we used razors to scrape the plant off and shook it off into water, afterwards we got a paintbrush, picked up some floating bits and carefully put them onto the glass slider, finally we dropped dye on the sample, let it sit, and flushed away the dye with water. And then we got to look under the microscopes and see what harakeke looks like up close.
Do you like science?
Thank you for reading my blog post ^^