Having recently taken on a bit of the management responsibility for Berry Go Round, I am duty bound to give it perhaps more room than we might have in the past. ((And if you want to be added to the email list for reminders, drop me a line.)) Mr Subjunctive at Plants are the Strangest People has done a bang up job of serving some botanical delights from the blogosphere. Head on over there for links to quasi-carnivorous plants, orchids galore, and much else besides. And here’s the stuff that’s more relevant to us. ((Some of which we have already noted and Nibbled, but hey, it all counts.))
Bizarrely, someone submitted the Wild Taro Research Project, which of course ought to be of great interest to lots of people here. But here’s the weird part: it’s password protected. So, now what? You’ve drawn attention to yourself and what you have to offer, but you won’t let us go any further? There’s a name for that kind of behaviour, and it isn’t very nice.
Hort Log has something called a flat and maroon ginger, but doesn’t know what actually to call it. Does Kaempferia qualify as a wild relative of Zingiber? No idea.
Christie Wilcox over at Observations of a Nerd lays into the Nature paper that asked whether alien species deserve their bad reputation. Her dissection of the argument may not make much sense if you can’t get at the original paper, but if you can, I hope you’ll enjoy her skewering as much as I did. It’s a gem. And, of course, some invasives are agricultural, and some invasives threaten agricultural species, so we’re happy both ways.
This one’s kinda meta, inasmuch as Farmscape’s post is in fact about another post; German artist Uli Westphal has been chanelling the ghost of Esther Rantzen ((Or would be, if she were dead, a reference for readers familiar with British TV.)) to collect images of outlandishly-shaped vegetables. Westphal calls the project Mutatoes. I didn’t check to see whether any oca had snuck in there. Another project documents tomato diversity. And hey, Uli, if you’re reading this, get in touch; we may be able to help you get to grips with taxonomy.
Mr Subjunctive also serves up Annals of Botany’s blog post on date sex, and really, some of the non-ag links are absolutely fascinating too. There’s a lot there.
The next Berry Go Round will be hosted at Beyond the Brambles, ((You too can be a host.)) and you can submit anything you come across, not just stuff you produced yourself.