I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.
Twittering sustainable agriculture
If you’re a twitter and are interested in sustainable agriculture issues, including agrobiodiversity, you may like to participate in the chat that is being planned for this coming Sunday from 8pm ET to 10pm. The focus will be education and the messaging around sustainability. The shape of things to come?
Nibbles: Moche, Nerica, AVRDC, Black bee
- Moche bean writing.
- “For Liberia’s subsistence farmers like Jeanet Gay, however, the Nerica may not offer such a ready solution to their annual hunger gap – indeed it may ultimately threaten their livelihoods.”
- AVRDC commits to the South Pacific.
- “The Victorians threw Apis mellifera mellifera out of hives in favour of more industrious foreign species.” Now this native British bee is coming back.
So much, much more than a weed
According to self-described “cultivator” David Randall in The Independent, it’s going to be a bumper year for dandelions in the UK.
Yet not everyone is clapping their hands with glee. According to reports in less ecologically sensitive newspapers, keen gardeners and lawn obsessives see dandelions as trouble, blemishes to their idea of contrived perfection, the removal of whose deep taproots can rick the sturdiest of backs. To them, dandelions are the enemy, insurgent forces of nature, forever pushing aside the “real” garden flowers, and taking over. They are thus condemned, in that most loaded of horticultural terms, as “weeds”.
This word, to those of us who have been gardening with dandelions for years, is not only wrong, but hurtful. Taraxacum officinale, as we cultivators call it, is a much undervalued addition to any plot. Not only do its golden rosettes brighten the dingiest corner, but you can use it to construct a salad, make an acceptable table wine, or even, when it runs to seed, tell the time. And you can’t say that about all those bloody purple alliums of which Chelsea’s show gardeners are so fond.
Quite right. Dandelions have a long history of use in medicine, yes, but also food. Although they do take some preparation. And of course there’s wine too. All this, plus an interesting taxonomy, and an endangered endemic relative. What more can you ask for? Weed indeed.
Latest AJFAND arrives
The latest issue of the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development (Vol. 9 No. 2) is out.
Nutrition features prominently as a result of the Ugandan Nutrition Congress which was successfully held in mid-February 2009 and we shall continue to announce the upcoming International Conference on Nutrition to be held in Bangkok in October 2009 and which will give prominence to African issues
That extends to Editor-in-Chief Prof. Ruth Oniang’o’s editorial.