Category: Fruits and nuts

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Breadfruit catalogue online

From Diane Ragone, director of the Breadfruit Institute at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii.

A catalogue of the breadfruit germplasm collection at the National Tropical Botanical Garden is now online as a searchable database on the Breadfruit Institute webpages. Varieties come to life through stunning photographs (courtesy of Jim Wiseman, DigitalMedia Hawaii/Pacific) that interactively present the visual gestalt of each tree, so necessary for accurate identification.

The database combines variety information acquired during field work in the islands of origin as well as descriptors, weights, and measurements of fruits, leaves, seeds, and male flowers, collected during a decade of research on the breadfruit trees at Kahanu Garden. Data and photographs are now available for close to 80 varieties. The entire collection of more than 100 varieties and three species will become available as photographs and data are completed.

Varieties from the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Hawaii, Kiribati, Mariana Islands, Palau, Samoa, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu are currently represented in the database.

The database search page allows the user to find varieties by searching on scientific name (species), variety name, geographic origin, distribution, fruit weight, shape, or skin texture, seed number, and find those that do well in coastal, sandy soils or atolls. There is also a search option for varieties that will be available for distribution. Other search options include 20 selected varieties, a Pacific map showing where varieties were collected, and a list of variety names and synonyms.

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Nibbles: Amazon, Aquaculture, Bees, ICTs, Food prices, Dates, Cats, Taro

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Nibbles for the road: Baobab, Breeding, Gardening, Earthworms, Taro, Pollinators, Llama, Trees, Chili peppers

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Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures

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Fennel prices on the go

We have blogged a number of times about the use of mobile telephony to lubricate markets. But the examples have usually been from developing countries. Now here’s one from Italy. And no, I don’t want to get into a discussion about the development status of il Bel Paese. If you register with SMS Consumatori, you can send them a text message containing the name of a product and they’ll send you one back in seconds with the average prices of that product in different parts of the country.

I tried it, and it works. Today the retail cost of 1 kg of finocchio (fennel) was € 1.85 in the north and € 1.30 in the south, for example. If someone is selling something at what you think are inflated prices, you can report them online. The website has a graph of prices for each product over the past few days. And each product also has a sort of descriptive fiche, which even lists the main varieties for some fruits and vegetables, though the price is not disaggregated by variety, alas. Here’s the information on fennel varieties:

… il Bianco Perfezione (varietà precoce, la raccolta avviene in luglio e agosto), il Gigante di Napoli, il finocchio di Sicilia e il finocchio di Parma (varietà invernale, raccolta da settembre a dicembre). Ricordiamo inoltre il Bianco dolce di Firenze, il Finocchio di fracchia, e il Tondo romano. I venditori usano distinguere i finocchi in maschi e femmine: non c’è nulla di scientifico in questo, fanno semplicemente riferimento alla forma che, nel caso del maschio è tondeggiante, nella femmina più allungata.

Ok, I’ll translate:

… White Perfection (an early variety, harvested in July and August), Neapolitan Giant, Sicilian Fennel and Parma Fennel (a winter variety, harvested from September to December). Let us also remember Florentine Sweet White, Fracchia’s Fennel, and Roman Round. Sellers distinguish between male and female types, but there is nothing scientific about this, it simply refers to the shape, which is rounder in the male and more elongated in the female.