Category: Featured

Cary Fowler thinks many heritage (or is it heirloom) apples are alive and kicking:

While some of these varieties are gone, many still exist. In fact, I have most of those pictured in my own orchard. Old varieties can be obtained from a number of sources such as Cummins Nursery, and Century Farm Nursery. Recently a new organization — the Temperate Orchard Conservancy — was formed in Oregon to rescue Nick Botner’s 4000+ apple variety collection. Even allowing for synonyms, this might be the largest varietal collection in the world.

Do your part and plant some!

Dirk Enneking is only marginally impressed by all this unique identifier stuff:

While the use of unambiguous identifiers to track reference materials is a sensible idea which should be mandatory, the assignment of yet another set of identifiers does not solve the headache that there are a lot of accessions whose origin is obscured due to poor documentation of their itinerary.

What’s needed? I’ll let Dirk tell you.

Max Ruas addresses some of the nerdy MGIS issues we raised:

Regarding the USDA collection based in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, we will correct the FAO CODE in order to be compliant with Genesys, in particular since MGIS is a data provider of Genesys. Then, for the discrepancy of accessions count, this is due to the fact that we now make visible only alive accessions while we provided to Genesys also with lost and eliminated accessions some month ago. It will be fixed as well for consistencies reasons.

Thanks for listening, Max. We look forward to future releases.

José Antão reacts to a Brainfood snippet about grapevine genetic resources conservation in Portugal (pdf):

The Portuguese are under-staffed. Pretty much all the work on intra-varietal diversity is done by Elsa Gonçalves and Antero Martins and their organization (Porvid). They give an example of one of the Portuguese native grapes with economic importance, but there are several dozens used in commercial vineyards and hundreds in the collections. Plus every once in a while they find a new variety that hadn’t been described previously. It’s a run against time, while increasing numbers of populations are eliminated (substituted by more fashionable varieties and commercially available clones).

Julia M. Schumann begs to differ with Jeremy on a point of Japanese linguistics:

In reference to the spelling question of konbucha (or kombucha) vs kobucha, I think that it was not so much a spelling mistake on the part of either author as a case of multiple pronunciations for the same meaning.

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