- Change at the helm at Crops for the Future. Best wishes to all concerned.
- African Rice Congress wraps up. Successfully, no doubt.
- Tell you Sacred Garden story. Go on then…
- Nigel Chaffey rounds up botanical news. The best of the kind, for my money.
- The art of eating durian.
- Bye, and thanks for the fish.
- DFID on undernutrition in India. Very short on specifics. Where’s the varied diets stuff?
- Gotta virus clean those heirloom sweet potatoes.
- Latest from CBD ABS negotiations in Cali. Anybody there want to give us the scoop?
- Endemic wild tomato relatives from Atacama Desert… I dunno…investigated I guess.
- Russian boffin grows apricots in Siberia.
It’s official, spring is here
Gotta love cherry blossom time.
Nibbles: Boswellia, Nepali rice, Andes, Pacific nutrition, Wild rice, Coffea, Kashmir, Fibres, Fermentation
- Saving Dhofar’s frankincense tree. Evocative things they are too.
- The rich may have trouble getting into heaven, but they manage more agrobiodiversity. At least of rice. At least in Nepal.
- Gotta be careful with niche modeling in mountain areas. Well, duh.
- New Pacific food leaflets from SPC.
- Ok, how weird is it that I have a personal connection of sorts to all of the above? Probably not much.
- Ex situ not enough for wild rice. Say it ain’t so!
- The evolution of coffee.
- “If the rains do not fall we may face problems with certain crops.” Right.
- Network on natural fibres proposed by Industree Craft Foundation and the Commonwealth Secretariat. Sounds like fun.
- Screening lactic acid strains for sorghum beer making. Well, kinda. Somebody please fund this vital research!
Blogging Niu Afa
Dr Roland Bourdeix is a senior researcher at CIRAD and an honorary research fellow at Bioversity International. He’s long worked on coconut genetic resources conservation and use, including at the Marc Delorme Research Station. He’s now in the South Pacific on a mission — in collaboration with my old pals at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community — to collect a famous Samoan coconut variety, and you can follow his progress on his new blog.
Where are those haskaps anyway?
A friend was excited to see a recent Nibble about the edible blue honeysuckle berry, or haskap. Alas, as she politely pointed out, “the link goes nowhere”. Which is weird because it obviously went somewhere when we wrote about it. On checking, though, and much searching, it turns out she is right. It seems like the source was what we in the trade call a splog, a blog that is effectively nothing but spam, and I cannot find anything on the web about the 1st virtual international scientific conference about those blasted berries. So, I’m removing the link from the Nibble, but leaving the text, and adding here a couple of genuine haskap links.
There’s Haskap Canada, which has a blog, and the Plants for a Future database entry. And those links are guaranteed not dead. And if you know more about that conference, we’ll be happy to include a genuine link in future.