- All of BGCI’s ex situ surveys on one cool page. Have they re-modelled their website?
- Harvard’s glass flowers are totally cool.
- The world’s coolest trees.
- Rhubarb is cooler than you think.
- I’m not sure paying over a thousand pounds for a pumpkin seed is all that cool.
- Conventional breeding is cooler than genetic engineering. Cool quote of the week: “I tell my students they should drop acid before they go to the field, and just look at the plants and let them tell you what they are doing.”
- Is the coolness over for quinoa? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
- Cool Pakistani bug may help with citrus greening in the US. But don’t stop looking for resistance, y’all.
Blogging the olive plague
It was inevitable, I suppose. There’s now a whole blog dedicated to the “Diffusion of xylella in Italian olive trees.” The latest post comments on an article in Nature which seems to suggest things are beginning to move in normally sleepy Puglia, epicenter of the apocalypse. Here’s hoping. But I still think they should have put like a hundred varieties out for testing two years ago, when this whole thing first started.
Featured: Plants Map
Tim likes the sound of Plants Map, but thinks we need a different approach to germplasm evaluation:
We are thinking a lot about this sort of platform at Seed Savers Exchange. Gardeners need better tools to learn what grows well in their area. In this day and age, there are so many models for citizen science projects like that… we just need the funding and a reliable coding partner to make one definitive site for data collection and dissemination. Such a tool would be very useful for breeders and genebanks too looking to crowd source the acts of assessing lines and identifying novel traits — but it would require breeders to screen in a different manner, that being they would need to ask simpler questions and be more open to qualitative data.
A genebank in central Madrid
Had a nice afternoon out at the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid last week, offspring in tow (who thankfully didn’t complain too much). It goes back to the late 18th century, and it’s beautifully laid out, and indeed located, though a cool and wet afternoon in early May did not show it off at its best. Anyway, there were a few nice wild Allium specimens out.
But what really caught my attention were the alley of local olive varieties…
…and, to a slightly lesser extent, the rows of local grapes.
I say “to a lesser extent” because some of the grape specimens seemed decidedly ropey to me. But maybe they’ll look better in the summer. Interestingly, the botanic garden does not feature in WIEWS as a genebank. Which it should, as it clearly is, and has been for a while, if the size of those olives is anything to go by.
Nibbles: GRIN-Global, Old gardens, Grain buildings, Roman eating, Armenian wine, Coffee GI, PAPGREN, Tamar Haspel double
- How to look for stuff in Chile’s genebank.
- How colonial Americans gardened. And later built stuff out of produce.
- How Romans ate.
- How Armenians are (still) making wine.
- How to figure out where your coffee comes from.
- How the Pacific is saving its crop diversity.
- How organic agriculture delivers benefits, and how it does not.
- How GMOs deliver benefits, and how they do not. By the same person as the above.