Forests & trees

Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets

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.

The 2nd World Seed Conference is coming up soon.
Orange bananas make it big in the Solomon Islands. Thanks, Lois.
DIVA-GIS website gets a makeover. Watch out for the blog.
Global protected areas map mashed up.
Dorian Fuller blogs lentil and bean domestication.
Bookforum.com does food.
While people discuss the pros and cons of assisted migration, one group has actually gone out and done it.

There are 227 bee species in New York City. Damn! But not enough known about the work they (and other pollinators) do in natural ecosystems, alas.
Borlaug home to be National Historic Site?
Archaeobotanist tackles Old World cotton.
FAO suggests ways that small farmers can earn more. Various agrobiodiversity options.
About 400 new mammal species discovered since 1993 (not 2005 as in the NY Times piece). Almost a 10% increase. Incredible. Who knew.
But how many of them will give you nasty diseases?
The caribou wont, I don’t think. And by the way, its recent decline is cyclical, so chill.
Saving the American chestnut through sex. Via the new NWFP Digest.
“The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected back to the farmers.” Yikes, easy, tiger! Via.

“Sahbhagi dhan is drought-tolerant and can survive even if there are no rains for 12 days.”
Keeping bees in cities. Not as crazy as it sounds.
More on the problems of the European bison. What is it with the BBC today?
Coffee berry borer coming to Kenya. Not boring at all.
Cassava helping Cameroonians and Ugandans.
ICRISAT pigeon pea a hit in Kenya.
Ugandan fishermen crying fowl. What is is with allAfrica today?
No trees were harmed in the making of this beef.
“How many of the changes we see happening around us are really attributable to climate change.” Pretty good question. In two parts, be sure to catch both, agrobiodiversity comes into the second.
How to get a date.
“By using museum specimens to look back in time, we can potentially assess … [human] impact in detail.” And genebanks, don’t forget genebanks, Olivia.
Organic better after all. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Fisheries not as bad as was thought after all. But still pretty bad.
For best results, use perennials in diverse landscapes and no tilling.

DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
“When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
“The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
“An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.