Category: Featured

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Featured: Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo

Eve knows what that maize stuff in the Machu Picchu light show is all about:

I think the figures in your screen grab are intended to represent Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, the legendary founders of Cusco and the Inca empire. Once they found the place where the golden scepter could be plunged easily all the way into the earth, that meant that was the place to build their city. They taught the people about agriculture (hence the maize), weaving, and all aspects of civilization, and went on to found the lineage of Inca rulers. There are many versions of this story — a couple can be found here or here.

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Featured: How tree tomatoes got to Kenya

Kate Gold asked herself how those tree tomatoes got to Kenya from the Andes, and then answered her own question:

“missionaries or settlers moving north from the Cape of Good Hope after the Boer Wars may have taken seeds of C. betacea with them to Kenya and Tanzania.”

Seeds had come to the Cape from the Botanical Gardens in Jamaica. How tree tomato reached Jamaica is not clear, but it was well established there by 1884 (but, interestingly, is seldom seen there today).

Lots more information and a map showing dispersal routes around the world:

Bohs, L (1989) Ethnobotany of the Genus Cyphomandra (Solanaceae). Economic Botany, 43(2), 1989, pp. 143-163

Sort of like Physalis, then?

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Featured: Famine

Back40 sees hope even in the Horn:

[S]killfully managed pastoral systems help retain water and halt or reverse desertification in arid regions in Africa. See Allan Savory. (Link added. Ed.) That doesn’t solve the entire food problem, but it helps. Over time catching and holding more rain can improve a whole region and enable some amount of cropping as well as livestock. There are limits to what a place can produce. We may not know those limits precisely, but they exist.

We’ve written about Savory before. And slowing down the run off. But those are mavericks. Is the mainstream smart enough to find out how we can work with the existing system, rather than against it?