Nibbles: Seed Treaty, Grelo festival, Large tomatoes, Saffron collecting, Enset redux, Grassland diversity, Census 2016, Organic definition, Dalit seeds, Ancient wheat DNA, Ancient American farmers, Tree adaptation, Syrian crops at OFN

What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
That’s one huge tomato.
That’s one expensive spice.
Rediscovering enset.
Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
Global agriculture: here comes the data.
Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.

2 Replies to “Nibbles: Seed Treaty, Grelo festival, Large tomatoes, Saffron collecting, Enset redux, Grassland diversity, Census 2016, Organic definition, Dalit seeds, Ancient wheat DNA, Ancient American farmers, Tree adaptation, Syrian crops at OFN”

The Phytophactor says:

November 5, 2015 at 7:58 pm

Isn’t it the saffron crocus stigma that serves as the dye/spice? The article says stamens. I’ve bought cheap stuff that included both, but it was intended to be used as a dye for Buddhist monks’ robes.

Reply
1. Dave Wood says:
  
  November 8, 2015 at 1:17 pm
  
  The `saffron robes’ of south and east Asia are more likely to be dyed from the safflower, Carthamnus tinctorius, which as the epithet indicates, is used as a dye plant. The best yellow dye I ever came across myself was in Morinda citrifolia from the CATIE collections in Costa Rica: an intense orange-yellow permanent dye from the root bark. I tried to eat almost every fruit in the collection but never dared try the smelly Morinda fruit (known as vomit fruit) although it is apparently a food in the Pacific islands.
  
  Reply