You’re in luck. Botanist in the Kitchen has a long piece on why they’re so hairy. And there’s news of a new genebank.
Nibbles: Turkish roses, Old apple tree, Kenyan reforestation, Pillar coral, ICARDA, Comical CWR
- The black roses of Halfeti.
- That original Bramley is still hanging on.
- Seedballs!
- A coral genebank? Why not.
- More on the ICARDA genebank.
- Sketching crop wild relatives.
Nibbles: Cloisters, Plum breeding, Wild tomatoes, Phytosanitary regulations, Public breeding, EU regulations, Svalbard @10, Local grains, Chips, ICRAF double
- Medieval monastery gardens deconstructed.
- Burbank’s plums decoded.
- The wild tomatoes of the Galapagos evaluated.
- Germplasm exchange expedited.
- Public sector plant breeding advocated.
- Farmer-saved seeds saved?
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault celebrated.
- Local flour milled.
- Potato chips (crisps) invented.
- Indigenous trees taken seriously. Very seriously.
Nibbles: Garlic history, Collecting, GMO course, Rice genebank, Mango diversity, Chilli diversity, Virtual plant breeding, Navel orange, LA tree, Cotton sustainability, Saudi agritourism
- Trying to promote a “poor person’s crop”? Try the garlic trick, ennobling.
- A Reference Manual for Expedition Plant Collectors, courtesy of the The Arnold Arboretum.
- Cornell runs a MOOC on GMOs. How about one on genebanks, eh?
- Maharashtra could maybe use it.
- You can never have too many mangoes.
- Or dried chillies.
- Next generation plant breeding.
- Riverside protects its famous citrus tree.
- But not all famous California trees are so lucky.
- Making cotton sustainable. Hard row to hoe.
- Saudi farm tourism. Even harder.
Yes, we have plenty of banana information
I’ve come across a number of banana-related resources lately, so I thought I’d pull them all together in one post.
First, there’s CropMapper.org, from Bioversity, which “aims to collect, to make available and to share spatial information on global banana production in a single centralized database.”
Then there’s “Banana natural biodiversity mapping,” from iNaturalist. It’s objective is “to map the distribution of CWRs and landraces in primary and secondary centers of diversity” through crowdsourcing. Which I suppose could eventually be added to the more conventionally sourced data in the CWR Atlas.
And finally there’s blog post from IITA describing a project to document banana diversity in the Democratic Republic of Congo using morphological traits that have been overlooked in the past. I assume the data will find its way into the Musa Germplasm Information System. And thence to Genesys.
All these contribute to answering a question that I asked here back in 2010: Where do bananas grow anyway? What I still don’t see, though, is a way to bring all this information together in one place.
And, given that there’s collecting going on as we speak, for example, the information — and the need — will only grow:
Researchers from the Meise Botanic Garden (Belgium), Plant Resources Center (Vietnam) and Millenium Seed Bank (UK) are in northern Vietnam to study and collect wild bananas. Follow their progress at #banana_expedition_2018. https://t.co/FIVObVECRS
— ProMusa (@promusa_banana) April 19, 2018