Category: Fruits and nuts

Posted on

Kesar magoes on the ropes in Gujarat

Farmers in Gujarat are cutting down their mangoes because they no longer yield enough.

Kanu Korat, a farmer of Mandola village in Talala, earlier grew Kesar mango trees on 3.5 hectares of land; but he had to hew them owing to the crop failure. A change of weather conditions in recent times ruined the crop in the region, with mango production falling by 75 per cent. As a result, the farmers here have not been able to quote the normal price of mangoes.

That’s a pity, because Indian mangoes have only recently been allowed back into the US market. I don’t know anything about mango diversity, but the Kesar variety seems popular and fairly common (over 8,000 Google hits), so I don’t suppose it will be endangered by the cull. But still. The shape of things to come? Is this climate change in action?

Posted on

Wild fruit relatives threatened in Central Asia

Fauna & Flora International and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have published a Red List of Trees of Central Asia. This is part of the Global Trees Campaign.

The new report identifies 44 tree species in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan as globally threatened with extinction. Many of these species occur in the unique fruit and nut forests of Central Asia, an estimated 90% of which have been destroyed in the past 50 years.

One of the threatened fruit trees is the red-fleshed Malus niedzwetzkyana, from Kyrgyzstan.

Working with the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences, the Global Trees Campaign is identifying populations of this rare tree in Kyrgyzstan and taking measures to improve their conservation. With distinctive red-fleshed fruit, the Niedzwetzky apple is an excellent flagship for the conservation and sustainable management of this beleagured forest type.

The report is available online.

Posted on

Penis pepper finally reveals its identity

A weird, comma-shaped fruit is often to be seen “floating over the soldiers marching off to be sacrificed or flying priests” in the artwork of the Moche, an agricultural people that frequented the coastal plain of northern Peru from A.D. 100 to 800. That’s been recognized since the 1930’s, when archaeologists gave it the name ulluchu — meaning “penis pepper” because of its shape — but without actually been able to say what the fruit was. Modern-day Peruvians just don’t recognize it, and botanists need more to go on for a scientific identification.

They got it recently when the actual remains of a fruit were found during excavation of the the tombs of Dos Cabezas in the ancient Moche city of Sipan. Ethnobotanists Rainer Bussmann and Douglas Sharon had been asking around for ulluchu for years:

“We would go to these markets and people would say, ‘We think we know what that is, but it’s not being sold here,'” said Sharon, the retired director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkley. “Well, one of the reasons it wasn’t being used is because the Ulluchu seems to show up during sacrifices. And no one is being sacrificed anymore.”

But armed with the physical specimens, desiccated as they were, Bussman, who works at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, eventually homed in on the genus Guarea, which is in the mahogany family, not the pepper.

“Rainer is a first-rate taxonomist,” Sharon said. “He studied every physical characteristic of these plants until he was absolutely certain we had it.”

Guarea seeds contain hallucinogenics and chemicals which raise blood pressure. Both would have been useful in sacrifices.

Bussmann, director of the garden’s William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources, plans to further study the plant’s chemistry and suspects it might have applications as a blood pressure and erectile dysfunction treatment.

The sacrificial soldiers in Moche artwork over which ulluchu fruits float often appear to have erections. Expect huge plantations to spring up in the Peruvian lowlands.

Posted on

Competing for heirlooms

The Independent has launched the Great British Butterfly Hunt.

In the Great British Butterfly Hunt we will seek to find and report on each one of our 58 varieties (56 residents and two Continental migrants)… We will report from right across the country on every single species.

But most importantly we are inviting you, the readers, to join us, and to see how many you can observe for yourselves. As the different species emerge at different moments of the spring and summer, we will be offering extensive guidance on identification and on how to find them. Some may well be in your back garden or local park. Others, especially the rarities, may involve a journey – albeit to the most beautiful parts of Britain.

To give an edge to it all, we are introducing an element of competition, and an unusual prize.

The person or group (such as a school class) which records the most species will win a special safari in late August, conducted by The Independent in conjunction with the charity Butterfly Conservation, to find the last butterfly of the summer – the most elusive of all the British species: the brown hairstreak.

A nice idea. Would it work for heirloom fruits and vegetables, say? Or pollinator species for that matter. Jeremy says they tried it at the Henry Doubleday Research Association ten years ago without a great deal of success. Any other examples out there?

Posted on

Farmers’ market fails to market diversity

Wandering around London on Friday, we came across the Pimlico Road Farmers’ Market. A couple of dozen stall selling everything from fruits and vegetables to cheese to all kinds of meat products, mostly sourced locally, meaning within 100 miles of the M25, the motorway that goes all the way around London. Friendly people. Beautiful produce, beautifully displayed. All impeccably organically certified — signs to that effect were everywhere. Made artisanally, naturally, according to traditions which no doubt trace their origins back to the mist-shrouded times of, well, the last Tory government, probably. And yet, and yet…

Apart from one stall selling tomatoes

tomato

and another one selling apples and apple products

apple

there was really no indication that agrobiodiversity was in any way valued, either by the sellers or buyers.

None of the stalls had more than one or two varieties of any of the fruits and vegetables on display. Ok, I thought, fair enough, we’re not dealing with a huge catchment area. But there was not even any mention of variety names on the labels. Maybe they’re all rather boring commercial cultivars and breeds, and the stall owners don’t want to draw attention to that fact. The European Union doesn’t make it particularly easy to grow heirlooms, as we’ve pointed out here before. And indeed a brief chat with a couple of stall holders did in fact reveal that none of the veggies on display were particularly noteworthy local varieties. Pity. It seems that the fact that produce is organically grown is an immeasurably more important selling point than its status as an ancient landrace, at least in this market in an affluent part of London, which I found surprising. I wonder if some enterprising student is making a study of all such markets across London.

Excellent pork pies though.