- New cassava varieties saving Zanzibar. Good to hear, though as ever one worries about what’s happened to the local landraces.
- Alder’s photos of the Potato Park. Do follow her travels around South America in search of agrobiodiversity.
- Namibia looks for other marula products.
- Saving the taimen in Mongolia. That would be a fish. A mighty fish.
- Interesting Indian symposia: wild fruits; “lifestyle floriculture.” Oh, to have more information.
- “Gariguette strawberries are an old variety and are non-licensed.” Crazy, eh?
Nibbles: Oil palm, Breadfruit, Barcoding, Guyana genebank, Wheat and heat
- Palmhugger, an oilpalm advocacy group, likens Greenpeace to Goebbels. Who are they really? CIFOR is linking to them on Facebook, so they’re probably kosher, right?
- Nice story on breadfruit in Hawaii.
- More barcoding stuff.
- Reader: We must have a bank of seeds of our fruits and vegetables. Minister of Agriculture: We do!
- Australian wheat boffins: “Adaptation strategies need to be considered now to prevent substantial yield losses in wheat from increasing future heat stress.”
Buddha’s hands
Speaking of weird fruits, Kuriositas has a great set of pictures of Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis, otherwise known as Buddha’s hand, for obvious reasons. My own contribution to the genre (at left) was snapped recently in Hanoi.
A different kind of pawpaw
WebEcoist has a nice series of slideshows on “70 Extremely Exotic Plants, Flowers, Forests & Trees.” Kinda silly, I know, but I’m a sucker for photos of weird plants, I guess. Anyway, the one on “Deliciously Exotic Plants, Fruits and Vegetables” puzzled me for a minute because the picture labelled “pawpaw” is certainly no Carica papaya. In my ignorance, I thought the term pawpaw was only ever used as a synonym for papaya. Well, it turns out the fruit in the picture is also called Hoosier banana, and is in fact Asimina triloba. Related to the cherimoya (Annona cherimola), “[t]he pawpaw is native to the temperate woodlands of the eastern U.S. The American Indian is credited with spreading the pawpaw across the eastern U.S. to eastern Kansas and Texas, and from the Great Lakes almost to the Gulf.” There’s a festival devoted to the fruit in Ohio in September. Interestingly, if you search Wikipedia for pawpaw, it sends you straight to Asimina. A Google search also returns mainly Asimina stuff, but if you search images you get a mixture of Carica and Asimina. The dangers of using common names.
Nibbles: Mangoes, Bees, Personalities, Business, Education, Meeting, Sorghum
- Mangofest in Miami. You missed it.
- Untreated seed saves bees? (Can someone please explain how this worked. If it worked.)
- Cary Fowler in the spotlight.
- IPCC envy? The Economist’s report on the Global Business of Biodiversity Symposium.
- “In seed time learn, in harvest time teach, in winter enjoy.”
- Ag experts descend on Ouagadougou for FARAweek. Hope springs eternal.
- Perennial sorghum?