- World’s oldest basil pollen “may be ‘medicine’”.
- Bioversity digitises the past and contributes to the future: The rise of Africa’s super vegetables.
- New network for sustainable intensification.
- Amaze your friends with you up-to-date knoweldge of the current state of grass genomics.
- Biochar is once again “the next big thing”.
Nibbles: Forced exercise, Monoculture, Nutrition, Afghan poppies, USDA pears
- Get fit, before you visit Expo 2015 in Milan.
- Monoculture has a good side? Say it isn’t so!
- Too busy farming to cook nutritious meals.
- Another triumph for crop improvement.
- Genebank goes pear-shaped.
A book worth waiting for
An old friend, Frederik van Oudenhoven, and his friend and colleague Jamila Haider, are deep in the proofs of what looks to be a wonderful book. With Our Own Hands “tells, for the first time, the cultural and agricultural history of the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs, one of the world’s least known and most isolated civilisations”. Should be a great read, with stunning photographs to accompany the local recipes, essays, stories and poetry. Better yet, generous donors are allowing 1800 copies to travel back to the Pamirs to be given to communities, schools, cooks and libraries.
If you’re interested, you should pre-order. Details here.
More millets than you can shake a stick at
Rather good advocacy video from the Deccan Development society.
Of course, you might get the impression from the film that nobody else has given millets a thought, but hey, that’s advocacy for you.
First thing, pawpaw, you gotta requisition a new name
Crowdfunding is one of the miracles of the internet age: put even the wackiest idea in front of a bajillion people and enough of them will pledge money to make it happen. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when Luigi sent me a link to Peterson Pawpaws Go Global. R. Neal Peterson wants your money to help him sell his pawpaw varieties. He needs $20,000 to trademark names for six of the varieties he has bred, so they can be sold in Japan and Europe. And he’s doing pretty well, with almost half of his goal and 16 days to go.
I’m not here to argue the rights and wrongs of asking folk to help defray what I would have thought were normal business expenses. I am concerned about that name. Of course, Peterson’s Pawpaws has a nice euphonious ring to it, but then so do melonette and strawberry peach, but you won’t find those names on any grocery labels.
You will, however, find kiwi fruit, though not in all its diversity, and the story of how the Chinese gooseberry came to be first a melonette and then a kiwi fruit is fascinating. 1
I happen to think that, for all their attractive alliterative allure, Peterson’s Pawpaws could use a little kiwi style re-branding. 2 Not that I have any great ideas. I just think that what with mountain pawpaws and papaya, which lots of people know as pawpaw, there’s just too much room for confusion.
What to call it? Banango has a certain misleading ring to it. Peterson’s varieties are all named after rivers, most of which in turn borrow from native American names. That’s why I quite like rassimin, apparently a native American name that is reflected in the genus Asimina.
You can surely do better.