- Maized and confused. The Economist looks at ethanol. Jeremy says: great headline.
- Would Cassava be any better? The post doesn’t even consider the question.
- Is it nuts to grow almonds in California and ship them to Vietnam for processing and packaging?
- This project aims to better understand the levels of agrobiodiversity found in homegardens. Yes, but in the UK?
- [A] gold mine of useful resources for city farmers.
- … a visionary pomologist, a fruit scientist, a species of practical rapturist … Wow!
What I did on my holidays: The Pluot
“Can I have one of these plums,” I asked the friend with whom we were staying in California.
“They’re not plums, they’re pluots. Some kind of cross between a plum and an apricot.”
Skeptical as ever, I rushed off to check such an outlandish claim, and, chastened, realized that there’s a lot I do not know about fruit. Not only is the pluot genuine, there are apriums and plumcots too. The one I tried was apparently called Dino Egg, a trademarked (and exceedingly fanciful — I mean, who knows?) name for a variety registered as Dapple Dandy.
Pluots are simply stunning. They are sweeter than most plums I’ve ever bought, and not in the least bit stringy. The flesh is not just sweet though; it has complex smells and tastes, slightly spicy, maybe, with — there’s no other way to put it — the taste of sunshine. And the flesh parts easily from the stone, at least the one I had did, which may be related to the lack of stringiness.
Fast forward a week and we’re barreling along I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. I’ve seen intensive industrial agriculture before, but this was still an eye-opener. ((The sheer logistics of it boggles the mind; we passed 14 double trailers full of ripe tomatoes and three of garlic — about right for a tomato sauce. I need to find a way in to that story.)) We pulled over to visit the store at Murray Family Farms, and found more kinds of pluot than you could shake a stick at. Time was pressing, so we couldn’t chat long to the two really friendly guys in the store, but we did buy a couple of bags of pluots to take Back East, where we’d never seen them.
They went down pretty well, with about as much skepticism about their origins as I had originally. That’s one of them, grown by a Nature’s Partner (and bought at a supermarket, not Murray Family Farms). The number ought to tell me which particular partner was responsible for that particular pluot, but although the Nature’s Partner web site does everything except squirt cider in your ear it doesn’t easily let you peer behind the number.
The day before my return to Rome, I noted in the local paper that the following day’s edition would contain an article entitled The hunt for the elusive pluot. Coincidence? I think not. In the end it turned out to be a review of a book about the hunt for the elusive pluot. Of course I haven’t read it yet, but judging from another review it might well be a tasty read.
Meanwhile, someone tell me whether pluots have spread beyond California? I stalk the supermarkets of the US as often as I can, but I’ve never seen it.
Home grown and heirlooms cause disaster
Organic tomato farmers in the northwest of the USA have been badly hit by late blight this year. New York Times Op-ed author Dan Barber blames heirloom varieties and the surge in home gardening.
Whether you thank Pollan or blame Wall Street, more than a third of American households is growing some of their own food this year, says the National Gardening Association. Home gardening has created a strong demand for tomato plants. And Walmart brings in truckloads of infected plantlets from the South, thus giving late blight an early start in unchecked terrain.
Barber suggests the use of education (plant pathology in the secondary school curriculum?) ((But Barber could learn a thing or two: he calls late blight a pathogen and a fungus. It is neither. It is a disease. Caused by Phytophthora infestans, which is an oomycete, an organism related to algae.)).
For all the new growers out there, what’s missing is not the inspiration, it’s the expertise, the agricultural wisdom and technical knowledge.
And those heirloom tomato varieties that farmers increasingly grow are highly susceptible to late blight. So why not use plant breeding?
It’s nostalgia when I celebrate heirloom tomatoes. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new. (…) like the Mountain Magic tomato, an experimental variety from Cornell University that appears to be resistant.
And then there is diversity:
The other day I saw a farmer who was growing 30 or so different crops, with several varieties of the same vegetable. Some were heirloom varieties, many weren’t. He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either.
The observation that retailers and home gardeners, and heirloom varieties, may have caused a major shift in a crop disease is very interesting. But the evidence is rather anecdotal. Perhaps it was just the weather? I would like to know more. I am sure the plant pathologists at Cornell are working on it.
Swaminathan says genebanks vital to cope with climate change
Gene banks are critical to preserving the biodiversity needed to develop crops that can cope with climate change, says agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan.
‘Nuff said, I think.
Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI
- There are 227 bee species in New York City. Damn! But not enough known about the work they (and other pollinators) do in natural ecosystems, alas.
- Borlaug home to be National Historic Site?
- Archaeobotanist tackles Old World cotton.
- FAO suggests ways that small farmers can earn more. Various agrobiodiversity options.
- About 400 new mammal species discovered since 1993 (not 2005 as in the NY Times piece). Almost a 10% increase. Incredible. Who knew.
- But how many of them will give you nasty diseases?
- The caribou wont, I don’t think. And by the way, its recent decline is cyclical, so chill.
- Saving the American chestnut through sex. Via the new NWFP Digest.
- “The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected back to the farmers.” Yikes, easy, tiger! Via.