- Need seed? Ask a bihana-maa, at least if you are in Orissa.
- Decline in UK honeybees reveals that crops not so dependent on them after all. Huh?
- A new strawberry for aesthetically-minded home gardeners.
- Wild Chilli group of Europe to visit Experimental Garden and Genebank of the Radboud University of Nijmegen. Send us a report?
- A free talk about the importance of perpetuating food plant resources for the future on Thursday, July 14. Oh, it’s on Hawaii. Send us a report?
Berry Go Round No. 41
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. 1 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. 2
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 3 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, 4 and you can submit anything you come across, not just stuff you produced yourself.
Nibbles: Parliamentary buzz, Weeds, Malthus, Suceava genebank, Fukushima farmers, Mangifera, Fermentation, Macaws, Biodiversity banks, Asses
- EU parliament, and others, urged “to improve conditions for pollinators in Europe”.
- Weeds. A book from Richard Mabey, now published and reviewed in the US.
- Ismail Serageldin will present the 2nd annual Malthus Lecture on 14 July at IFPRI. I’ll be staying late to follow the webcast.
- The Romanian genebank at Suceava seems to have a kind of progress report.
- They’re making a film about the organic farmers of Fukushima.
- Mango diversity picture goodness.
- Turns out making ginger beer doesn’t involve ginger. What it does involve is a weird agrobiodiversity symbiosis, but you had me at beer.
- Ancient Chacoans bred macaws. And why not.
- Biodiversity offsets are a huge market. What I want to know is if any of than money could go to genebanks.
- Ethiopian donkey power.
Educate girls, plant a school garden, promote biodiversity
What’s not to like?
This post is simply an abuse of authorial rights to promote a project. I just received the second project report from Educate 1300 Girls By Restoring A Marrakech Garden, which I am supporting via Global Giving. Why that project? Because it is relevant to me in all sorts of ways. Maybe to you too; they still need to raise about $15,000.
During the past academic year, thirty students conducted their own field research by interviewing Marrakechi herbalists about important cultural recipes. [The Global Diversity Foundation] is now organizing a database of the girls’ findings, titled, “An Ethnobotanical Study of Five Traditional Women’s Recipes.” In the autumn of this year, the girls will be able to re-examine, analyze, and discuss their own data. We hope that this will be the first of many such educational initiatives at Lalla Aouda Saadia.
I look forward to the next report, which I hope will tell me more about those traditional recipes, and to the garden’s continued growth.
Nibbles: Impact, Descriptors, Oca, Sacred groves,
- Does the pressure for impact compromise research? Thought-provoking post from CIFOR’s Director General.
- FAO wants your opinion on the FAO/IPGRI List of Multi-crop passport descriptors. They probably don’t need you to tell them that IPGRI has changed its name. Or do they?
- Ocapoppin’ at Rhizowen acres; 100 varieties! I’ll alert the National Geographic.
- Sacred groves sustain bio-cultural richness in Yunnan forest. Still.