Author: Luigi Guarino

Posted on

Gardening by stealth

Here’s an intriguing idea: guerrilla gardening, “gardening in public urban spaces with or without permission.” It includes

fly-by-night plantings in urban wastelands, lobbing “seed grenades” into fenced-off empty lots, planting trees in the middle of nowhere, covering traffic circles with native ground cover, sowing edible plants in school-yards, draping lamp posts with decorative creepers, developing community gardens and empowering disaffected youth by reintroducing them to the joys of dirtying one’s hands in the soil.

It’s all described in the book Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey, which has been getting some good reviews. We’ve blogged before about the many benefits of school food gardens. They’re great ways of teaching kids about agrobiodiversity, as well as providing healthy, nutritious food for their snacks. We just recently passed the point where 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. I imagine we’ll become increasingly familiar with — and thankful for — the activities of urban guerrilla gardeners.

Posted on

Grapes of concord

Grape breeders in the US are making hybrids between Vitis labrusca, a species native to the eastern US best known for the Concord variety, and Vitis vinifera, the European grape, in an effort to get the best of both worlds:

By putting in up to 28,000 seedlings yearly, however, Mr. Cain said he hopes to find marketable varieties, maybe from vines planted last year. He also wants varieties that look distinctive, like elongated grapes, to let consumers know they’re something special. “Combining Eastern and Western grapes in California is like bringing some of the best musicians in the world together on the stage,” Mr. Clark said. “Now let’s see what they’re going to play.”

Offhand, I can’t think of another example of an important crop with easily crossable congeneric species endemic to the Old and New Worlds, as is the case with Vitis. But I could be wrong…

LATER: What an idiot, there’s cotton, strawberry, lupins…