- Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
- If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
- The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
- International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
- Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
- CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
- ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
- Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
- The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
- Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.
The Queen’s mulberries
That would be the British Queen. And yes, she has mulberry trees. A collection of them, believe it or not. On the grounds of Buckingham Palace, no less. Thanks to Sophie Leguil for pointing me to the story, which is absolutely fascinating, and which you can read in full on the Official Website of the British Monarchy.
Putting white gloves on to examine the precious book on the Queen's National Collection of Mulberries @Buck_Palace pic.twitter.com/VQPZomyRWv
— Sophie Leguil (@SLeguil) December 3, 2013
Here’s how the story starts, just to whet your appetite:
In 1608 King James I had a Mulberry Garden planted on an area of approximately 17,500 square yards to the north of the present Palace in an attempt to foster the cultivation of silk worms, which had been successful on the continent.
And here’s how it ends:
The collection was awarded provisional National Collection status in October 2002 and granted Full Status in August 2005. Most of the collection is housed at Buckingham Palace whilst a few are held at Kensington Palace and Marlborough House. The mirror collection at the Royal Gardens, Windsor is performing well with good growth all round.
…
The number of taxa planted in the various gardens is now 35, made up of 9 species (inc. subspecies) and 24 cultivars. The new accession this year has been Morus mongolica received from John Fielding. All plants in the collection are currently labelled distinctly with the Plant Heritage logo to identify the individual specimens in the collection.
But really the fun bit is in between, so do read the whole thing. So many questions arise. Do I write to the HM The Queen if I want seeds, or a cutting? Is she the one to sign the MTA? What descriptors does she use, and are the data online? Does Prince Charles insist on organic management of the trees, and on selling the produce at exorbitant prices? And why is her collections not in WIEWS?
Nibbles: EU rules, Squash, Potato, Agroforestry textbook, Wine for health, Ag history, Breeding stories, Food security reports, Talking to policymakers
- Plants for Europe is (are?) incensed about new EU regulations. Should it/they be?
- Squash is a Native American word, natch. I bet they’re incensed.
- Speaking of Native American crops, here’s a big writeup on the potato, including great pix, and nice shoutout for the CIP genebank.
- If you live in the tropics and want to learn about agroforestry, you could just go out and talk to the first smallholder you meet. Or you could read a textbook.
- A roundtable on whether genetics can help us figure out whether wine is good for you. When they do the large scale clinical trial, as they surely must, I’ll be first in line.
- The breakthroughs of agriculture. Sadly, working out the seed viability equation does not feature. Nor does vegetarianism.
- Breeding does, though. And here’s an example why, featuring soybeans.
- And another from rice: IRRI bags another silver bullet gene.
- And we’ll soon have those in cotton too.
- Which is all fully recognized in the latest WRI report on how to feed the world.
- Though not in this other mega-report on Brazil, at least not quite so explicitly.
- “We need more research” is the wrong answer. Even when it’s breeding?
A genebank gets a slap on the back
I have to say that IPK’s an incredibly important resource for plant breeders. Without gene banks like Gatersleben we’d have lost so much more of our crop diversity. They deserve wider recognition for the work they do.
Oh wow. Unsolicited praise for a genebank. Whatever next. It comes from Graham. D. Jenkins-Belohorska, on the Facebook group Plant Breeding for Permaculture. With all due respect, I suspect its audience is limited. So I’m reproducing the whole exchange here. I really hope they won’t mind. It gets more specific, so it’s worth reading in full. Click on the image to enbiggen, and squint. Just in case this link doesn’t work. And kudos to IPK.
But do you have a genebank you’d like to thank (or complain about, what the hell)? Let us know here.
Brainfood: Latvian tomato heirlooms, Sinai desert gardens, Orange silkworms, Indian pony breeds, Korean radishes, Anthophagy, Hybrids and diversification, Oregano oils, Chinese peanuts, Ethiopian sorghum, Wild rice crosses
- Latvia’s Tomato Rebellion: Nested Environmental Justice and Returning Eco-Sociality in the Post-Socialist Eu Countryside. The Man tries to enforce the European Common Catalogue, Latvians rebel.
- Traditional agricultural gardens conserve wild plants and functional richness in arid South Sinai. Wild plants survive in gardens, which thus combine diversity and utility.
- Analysis of a silkworm F1 hybrid with yellow cocoon generated by crossing two white-cocoon strains: Further evidences for the roles of Cameo2 and CBP in formation of yellow cocoon. What, are we expected to eat this thing now, what with its high carotenoid content and all?
- Genetic diversity and bottleneck studies in endangered Bhutia and Manipuri pony breeds. Bottleneck? What bottleneck?
- Analysis of the genetic diversity of radish germplasm through SSR markers derived from Chinese cabbage. New Korean radish varieties not same as old Korean radish varieties.
- Ethnobotanical study of anthophagy culture in mountainous area of Wenzhou. It pays to eat flowers.
- Enabling adaptation? Lessons from the new ‘Green Revolution’ in Malawi and Kenya. Adopting hybrids, and thereby escaping the “low maize productivity trap” is no guarantee that your thoughts will turn to crop diversification.
- Phytomorphological and Essential-Oil Characterization in situ and ex situ of Wild Biotypes of Oregano Collected in the Campania Region (Southern Italy). Both nature and nurture play a role. Look for high glandular and stomatal density.
- Diversity characterization and association analysis of agronomic traits in a Chinese peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) mini-core collection. Can it really be down to just 15 alleles?
- Assessment of molecular diversity and population structure of the Ethiopian sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] germplasm collection maintained by the USDA–ARS National Plant Germplasm System using SSR markers. High diversity, no structure, much duplication, little passport data.
- Crossability patterns within and among Oryza series Sativae species from Asia and Australia. Some easy, some difficult, all interesting.