Category: Featured

Amy Goldman on Top tomatoes totted up:

Thanks for the mention of my work with tomatoes. I wasn’t contacted for the Mother Earth article. Some of my favorite favorites did make the Top Twenty (including Orange Banana, Amish Paste, BIg Rainbow, Black Krim, Aunt Ruby’s, Opalka); of course, I’ve got many other favorites.

Indeed she has, as this slideshow shows.

EJ on Zoos in Trouble:

Another reason that growing seeds in gardens and seed exchanges as well as raising the animals we need on working farms is so important. Once we give away our heritage it is at the mercy of fickle funders.

P Russo points out that

There is an interactive USDA plant hardiness zone map for the continental United States. And another map using USDA zone designations for the United Kingdom.

The map in question is the old map, and we’ll have to see whether they will update it when the new one comes out. The website is interesting in that it also includes distribution maps for a large number of native trees of North America.

Cary Fowler suggests a novel approach to developing policies for access and benefit sharing:

Rather than start with the policies we may instinctively love and want, this pedigree shows us that we should begin with what we want to achieve, such as flood-tolerant rice, work backwards from there, and ask ourselves what policies will be needed to achieve such this rice, or UG99-resistant wheat, or low-toxin lathyrus, or…

J. Giles Waines clarifies wheat domestication:

“World wide wheat species” do not descend from einkorn wheat Triticum monococcum (AmAm), first cultivated close by Gobekli. The source of the AuAu genome in BBAuAu tetraploid and BBAuAuDD hexaploid wheats is a wild diploid species, Triticum urartu, that was never cultivated as far as we know, nor domesticated. It does grow in the vicinity of Urfa, Turkey, and is more drought tolerant than einkorn. The source of the BB genome that provided the egg of the initial hybrid, and hence the extra genes for mitochondria and chloroplasts is thought to be an ancestor of present day Aegilops speltoides, which also grows near Urfa and Harran.