The Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria in Argentina has a new online pest and disease atlas out. It’s in Spanish, but pretty intuitive to use. You can search by host or by pest/disease organism. And you get a bunch of references, descriptive notes, photos and a map, albeit a static one — not sure how updating will be done. Below is the distribution of Setosphaeria turcica, the causal agent of Northern Leaf Blight in corn, for example. Would be interesting to mash this kind of thing up with the distribution of tolerant material. Must look into that. And of course one could do some climate change prediction modeling too. Thanks to IIALD.
Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets
- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.
Nibbles: Seed travels, Carotenoids in cucumbers, Tea and hibiscus, Sea level rise, Tewolde on climate change, SPGRC
- After a year’s travel in search of seeds, Adam Forbes turns in his report.
- The genetics of orange-fleshed cucumbers elucidated.
- Tea and hibiscus booze.
- Video of honey harvesting.
- Maps of sea level rise. All somewhat unsatisfying, somehow.
- “Because we are poor, we shall suffer first but, ultimately, we shall all die together.”
- SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre (SPGRC) director Paul Munyenyembe does the public awareness thing.
Nibbles: Tofu, Pluon, Community gardens, Indian drought, Trees, Chicks, rare breeds
- Tofu, anyone?
- Plumcot, anyone?
- Guerrilla gardening, everyone!
- Green Revolution breadbasket drying up. ICRISAT has the answer. Well, sort of.
- BBC has a different answer. Trees can keep people alive in times of drought.
- More semi-naked chicks, this time in South Africa.
- Naked or otherwise, eat them to save them, with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.
Getting to the bottom of potato late blight resistance
There’s a bit of an argy-bargy developing in the comments to Robert’s provocative post Inorganic farming. Anastasia raised the question of transgenics for fungal resistance, which Robert echoed. Patrick then waded in bullishly to ask why transgenics were needed, when breeder Tom Wagner “has created quite a number of potato lines totally resistant to late blight”. And that created a clamour from Robert to the effect that he couldn’t find any evidence of Wagner’s success on this front.
Two points.
First, although Patrick was perhaps too modest to say so, he has arranged for Tom Wagner to be at a meeting in Oxford, England, as part of a Greater European Tour that Tom is undertaking in the autumn. So anyone who wants to know about his selections for late blight resistance can get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And report it here, please.
Secondly, don’t panic. Scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland and elsewhere have discovered a single gene that, they say, is the key to blight resistance. “We are really excited by the discovery of RXLR. This has provided a signature to search for proteins that are delivered inside host cells, where they may be exposed to plant defence surveillance systems,” said Professor Paul Birch, the team leader. Clearly it won’t be long before the threat of late blight is a thing of the past.