- Gene controlling rice architecture may hold promise for increased yield. Unless, of course, it doesn’t.
- Attempts to control a deadly cassava virus in central Africa. I hope someone is conserving those susceptible varieties. They may be useless now, but who knows what the future will bring? And more questions.
- And following the Kibale post, more on non-timber forest products and their trade.
8th International Wheat Conference and BGRI 2010 Technical Workshop
Wheat boffins are meeting in St Petersburg. CIMMYT is blogging about it. ICARDA is blogging about it. A whole bunch of people are twittering. So there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going on.
Nibbles: Rust, Old rice, More old rice, Sticky rice, Mesoamerican balls, Prioritization, Legumes
- Rust boffins meet in St Petersburg. Good luck to them: sounds like they’ll need it.
- Did 3000-year-old rice really sprout in Vietnam? Nah.
- Indian farmers queue up for old rice seeds. Not old as in the Vietnam case above though.
- And more rice. Did the Chinese really use the sticky kind in mortar 1500 years ago? Yep.
- More ancient technology. This time Mayan rubber.
- “…a major leap forward in species-area relationship fitting…”: where will future habitat loss wreak the most havoc on plant species? And on crop wild relatives?
- The pulses of Africa. Well, a couple of them.
Green tomato goes red, gets thumbs up
Rebsie Fairholm at Daughter of the Soil has written up the tomatoes she grew last year. One of them I called Pugliese Green, because the seeds came from a variety I buy at the Pugliese shop around the corner. It is green, sharp and tasty. Rebsie’s went red, but at least she agreed with the taste: she says they will “probably become a flavour benchmark”. I wonder whether mine would go red too if they were left longer on the vine. I’ll have a chance to find out soon enough as my seedlings are coming along fine. Meanwhile, Rebsie, try tasting them a bit green.
Nibbles: Wild coffee in Uganda, Grasspea, Land Institute, Biopiracy, Frog endangered by tea
- Conservation project fails to work. But lessons are learned.
- The archaeology of grasspea. Mainly Aegean, as it turns out.
- Artificial selection can help fill gaps left by other kind.
- Nestlé accused of stealing roiboos.
- Tea or frog?