- Sustainable salmon farming.
- New NWFP up.
- Weird root crop. h/t Sam.
Nibbles: School gardens, Nabhan, Reforestation, Swine flu, Boar, Nutrinomics, Medieval sheep, Market, Acacia, Livestock breeds, Bees, Buffalo breeding, Quinoa
- Resource list for setting up a school garden. Take that, Flanagan.
- Gary “Eco-gastronaut” Nabhan goes viral.
- Smithsonian goes native. Trees, that is.
- GRAIN video delves into origin of H1N1.
- There are boar farms of England?
- Nutrition advice needs to take genetics into account.
- Tracing the changing morphology of British post-medieval sheep. Well, someone has to do it.
- Thai floating market. A tourist trap, I know. But photogenic.
- Kew’s plant of the day is gum arabic. Wait, Kew has a plant of the day? Is there no end to their ingenuity?
- And GlobalDiv has a Breed of the Month. BTW, the same source has a thing on the XVIII Plant and Animal Genome Conference (Jan. 2010).
- Diverse diet for healthier bees, says BBC
- Breeding bovines in Asia.
- Cursed quinoa.
Nibbles: Butchered, Drought, Extension, Deforestation, AnGR, Soyabean, Sagittaria, Urban ag, Grasslands
- Locavore carnivores learn their chops.
- Researchers from Michigan to study drought in East Africa.
- Researchers from Michigan to improve African access to research.
- Get online to save the Amazon.
- “When the National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP) opened its doors a decade ago, it started out with genetic material from 40 lines of chicken…”
- And today’s genome sequencing project is…
- Hunting wapato.
- Mexican agriculture comes to LA.
- Today’s answer to climate change is…
Nibbles: Colony Collapse, Chinese reforestation
- Colony Collapse Disorder: Resilience Science has the latest Science in depth, so we don’t have to.
- Increase in tree cover in Chinese villages since 1940s amounts to 1/20th of tropical deforestation. Damn!
Indigenous vs exotic trees in Kenya
I promised to reveal a silver lining to the black cloud of my mother-in-law’s forced felling of part of the eucalypt plantation she’s been tending and coppicing forever, her main source of firewood, so here goes. The sight of the newly bare patch of land made her start looking around for a source of seedlings for replanting, and a coincidental visit by some old friends of mine got her thinking that maybe she should go indigenous. At least partly, anyway. Eucalypts are too fast-growing to give up altogether. Her visitors were Lex Thomson and Randy Thaman, who I worked with in the Pacific, and were in Kenya for the International Agroforestry Congress. They noticed a few Prunus africana trees around her place, and told her about its potential. Lex has since left a comment about this on an earlier blog post of mine.
Anyway, after some searching around, Hilda (for that is her name) came across Mr Douglas Ndirangu Kirichu’s nursery at a place called Lari Forest Station in Uplands Division, a short drive along a passable dirt road from her farm. Mr Kirichu runs the Kimotu Environmental Group. He has about a hundred people who collect seeds from the surrounding forest, which he then raises to seedlings and sells, for KSh 30 each (that’s about USD 0.50). Apparently there’s a law that a community can only graze their animals in the forest if they also have a nursery raising indigenous tree seedlings for replanting. So that’s what Mr Kirichu’s group does. To the tune of about 30,000 seedlings when we visited him. ((Oh, and thanks to Hilda’s daughter Linda for taking the notes during our visit.))
In addition to Prunus africana (mueri in Kikuyu), Mr Kirichu (that’s him on the left in the picture below) also has muna (Aningeria), mutamayo (Olea), mukoe (Dombeya), pondo and mukima (not sure what these are — maybe someone out there can help me?).
So we bought a couple of each, of course. And Hilda got a dozen mueri to start off her plantation.
And we planted them both up at the farm (thanks, GK!) and down in Nairobi. Maybe that made the holiday carbon neutral?
