Category: Fruits and nuts

Posted on

A London botanical garden in trouble

It sounds as though the botanical garden of the South London Botanical Institute may be threatened by development. According to BGCI the garden has a particularly important collection of Rubus. The institute’s website mentions a Medicinal Border, Gerard’s Border, a Southern Hemisphere Area, and also that

British natives, ferns, scented plants, drought tolerant plants, monocots and unusual vegetables are also represented.

So some agricultural biodiversity is involved here, though I do not know to what extent the “unusual vegetables” and Rubus species, say, are to be found in other genebanks and botanical gardens. In any case, if you think losing this garden would be a bad idea, you can sign a petition. Fingers crossed.

Posted on

Nibbles: Organic breeding, Agroforestry, Metallophytes, Fermentation, Grain storage

  • Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
  • Farm Radio does tree farming.
  • A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
  • As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
  • This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.
Posted on

Nibbles: Irish Famine book, Breeding for adaptation, Neolithic diets, Randy Thaman, Ecological Babylon, IPR for smallholders, Botanical gardens

  • Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
  • Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
  • Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
  • Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
  • Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
  • Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
  • Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.
Posted on

Nibbles: Red List, Açaí, Edible forest, Horticulture, Heirloom seed bank, Malnutrition journal, Tea breeding, Speak!

Posted on

Cheers

I can’t believe I forgot to include news of the President’s homebrew in the list of my favourite agrobiodiversity stories of the past few weeks. I suppose it was all done by the Obama campaign as part of a complicated social media strategy to deflect attention from the Republican convention, but I don’t care. I like that the hop varieties involved, Kent Goldings and Fuggles, have venerable, and not uninteresting, histories.