Apologies for the light blogging lately, but both Jeremy and I are on the road and busy with other stuff. When last seen, Jeremy was on vacation in Maine, dealing what will probably be the mortal blow to its lobster population. And I’ve been in and out of meetings all week, but I’ve got a couple of days off now and may have time to catch up on the old feed reader.
This is a good place to do that. I’m visiting the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. They have a very pleasant campus in a spectacular area with a well-developed ecotourism industry:
CATIE has a botanic garden and an active seedbank for forest species. But it also has an interest in agrobiodiversity conservation, with very important field genebanks of cacao, coffee and peach palm, and a crop seed genebank specializing in local vegetables, maize and beans. More later.
Would CATIE be a cool stop for a fruit geek like me? I was hoping to visit while I was in Costa Rica, but I had transport issues (as in I had none, and getting there via bus was going to kill basically three days).
They do have a big interest in tropical fruits, I’ll let you know tomorrow what exactly they have in the field. The San Jose-Turrialba bus service is pretty good, cheap and fairly reliable, takes about 1.5 hours one way.