Luigi Guarino

February 8, 2023

The Seed Information Database is back!

Readers may remember a post from about a year ago announcing with sadness the imminent demise of Kew’s Seed Information Database (SID).

Well, cheer up. It seems SID is back.

The Seed Information Database (SID) is now hosted by the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (RBGK). SID is a compilation of seed biological trait data, with records derived from measurements and observations on seed collections held in Royal Botanic Garden Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank and from other unpublished and published sources, through donation or abstraction.

Good news for genebanks everywhere.

February 7, 2023February 7, 2023

Nibbles: Mugumu, Gates, Fixation, OSA, USDA, Panicum, Digitaria, Britgrub, Wheat, ICRISAT, Svalbard

Blog post on the importance of the mugumu tree in Kikuyu culture.
Alas, no sign of mugumu trees on the Kenyan farm visited by Bill Gates recently. But there were chickens, drought-tolerant maize and mobile phones…
…and there may soon be crops engineered for nitrogen fixation too, if his foundation’s project with the University of Cambridge comes through.
Speaking of maize, here’s a nice illustrated story of how the Organic Seed Alliance is helping farmers grow their own tortilla corn in the Pacific Northwest.
To generalize and contextualize the above, read this USDA e-book on plant collections and climate change.
Dr Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute just got a grant to study broomcorn millet domestication and dispersal in Central Asia. There may be lessons for present-day adaptation to climate change, says the blurb.
There are probably lessons about adaptation to climate change also to be had from Kew’s work on fonio and other traditional crops in Guinea.
I wonder if Kew boffins are also working on bere, perry and other endangered British foods though.
It’s always nice to see someone first learn about genebanks, and how they can help with the whole climate change thing.
Meanwhile, in India, ICRISAT gets a stamp, which however doesn’t look very much like India or ICRISAT to me. Plenty of broomcorn millet in its genebank, by the way.
Plenty of seeds from the ICRISAT genebank in Svalbard, as Asmund Asdal will no doubt point out on 10 February.

February 6, 2023February 7, 2023

Ingathering of the seed faithful

The Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme has an annual Seed Gathering, and the one for 2023 is coming up fast.

On 11th and 12th of February 2023, we will host our second Seed Gathering – a space for our seed networks to come together to share, learn, and celebrate all the incredible work going on throughout our lands. Join us!

Here’s the programme, and how you can follow on social media and snag merch.

February 6, 2023February 5, 2023

Brainfood: Sulawesi Warty Pig, Neolithic violence, Early cotton, Livestock poop, Pontic millet, Bronze Age opium, Sami shamanism, Wild chickens

Pigs as Pets: Early Human Relations with the Sulawesi Warty Pig (Sus celebensis). You don’t need to be a sedentary agricultural society to domesticate an animal as a pet. There was the dog, and also the Sulawesi Warty Pig.
Conflict, violence, and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe. Early sedentary agricultural societies were not exempt from violence, pets or no pets.
The earliest cotton fibers and Pan-regional contacts in the Near East. At least early sedentary agricultural societies did all that fighting wearing comfortable cotton garments.
How animal dung can help to reconstruct past forest use: a late Neolithic case study from the Mooswinkel pile dwelling (Austria). In between spells of fighting, early sedentary agricultural societies let their livestock roam the forest during the day but kept them in their settlements in winter, and that accumulates a lot of dung that can come in useful thousands of years later in working out what said livestock ate in said forest.
Between Cereal Agriculture and Animal Husbandry: Millet in the Early Economy of the North Pontic Region. You didn’t need to be a completely sedentary agricultural society to grow Panicum miliaceum in the Pontic steppes.
Opium trade and use during the Late Bronze Age: Organic residue analysis of ceramic vessels from the burials of Tel Yehud, Israel. There comes a time when a sedentary agricultural society will start growing, and then selling, drugs.
A Sacred Tree in the Boreal forest: A Narrative About a Sámi Shaman, her Tree, and the Forest Landscape. You don’t need to be a sedentary agricultural society and grow drugs to have a rich spiritual life, but it’s harder — though not impossible — to document it.
Historic samples reveal loss of wild genotype through domestic chicken introgression during the Anthropocene. Sedentary agricultural societies are polluting the genetics of wild species related to domesticates. The chicken in this case, the Sulawesi Warty Pig unavailable for comment.

February 3, 2023February 24, 2023

Celebrating beans, by sharing beans

With World Pulses Day coming up on 10 February, there is probably no better time to sign up for the INCREASE Project’s citizen science experiment, Share the Bean.

You can register your participation until 28 February. What will you do? I’ll tell you what you’ll do:

receive a packet with a few different bean varieties to grow in your garden, terrace or balcony
plant and grow these seeds following the specific instructions provided by the project
nurture your beans, and collect and record information about them using a handy app
suggest, and receive, tips and best practices, also via the app
harvest the seeds and offer them for exchange, and cook and taste them too if you like
send your assessments and recipes for inclusion in “Thousands of traditional and innovative recipes to cook beans,” to be published on the project website