- 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.
Traditional foods get the upscale treatment in Kenya
Matoke, spinach (local, or genuine Spinacea oleracea?) and rice (why not sorghum, or millet?) about to be served at a Nairobi restaurant. ((Ignore the tomato; everyone does.)) The photo illustrates an article in the Daily Nation, following up on Agriculture Minister William Ruto’s call for traditional crops to be given a greater role in Kenya’s food security plan. According to the article, Kenya’s farmers, or their representatives, seem to want more and better incentives to turn away from maize. I wonder, though, whether the most far-sighted farmers, and restaurants, won’t show the way by adopting agricultural biodiversity and thus turning a healthy profit, thank you very much.
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.
Silphium rediscovered?
Luigi dug up this great article — Devil’s Dung: The World’s Smelliest Spice — which reveals more about asafoetida than you could possibly ever have wanted to know. Lord but it is strange stuff to cook with, and yet I do like what it does for a dish. But I digress. Buried in a sidebar near the bottom of the page is a claim, complete with coy question mark, that silphium, most prized spice of ancient Rome, might be alive and well. The article recounts the history of silphium, and how it was believed to have gone extinct by the 1st century CE, so I won’t repeat that here. It also mentions the possibility that Cachrys ferulacea and ancient silphium are one and the same. ((GBIF doesn’t yet know about the record from Cyrenia.)) Personally, I have no idea, and I’m not even sure I know how one would know, but I’m intrigued. Thanks Luigi.