- Biodiversity in cultivated Panax notoginseng populations.
- Worms add value to waste.
- Urban homesteading? Whatever next?
Rare crops need love too
Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, argues that the world is currently too reliant on just a handful of key species of edible plants for food.
Welcome aboard, Prof. Hopper!
Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain
- “How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden.” Thanks, Danny.
- Bitter food=betrayal.
- DNA bank for Irish dairy and beef cattle being established.
- “… a document from 1631 … mentioned threats to the cacao crop.”
- USAID supports cassava farmers in Africa.
- The simpukng forest gardens of the Dayak deconstructed.
- Shit!
- 1170% of your daily cholesterol per serving. Sounds good to me.
Using wild rice to fight pests
Well, maybe. The article in The Monitor is a bit confused. Yes, there are wild rices in Uganda. I know because I was (marginally) involved in the 1997 Sida-IRRI project which collected wild Oryza in Eastern and Southern Africa. The material has been conserved since then in the National Genetic Plant Resources Centre for Crops in Entebbe, and has now been evaluated — successfully, it would seem — for resistance to Yellow Mottle Virus. Which is great. But the crossing with cultivated rice has not started in Uganda, I don’t think. The crosses that are alluded to in the article seem rather to have been between Asian rice and cultivated African rice (Oryza glaberrima), presumably aiming to replicate the success of Nerica in West Africa. Anyway, good luck to Drs John Mulumba Wasswa and Jimmy Lamo with the breeding programme.
Hawaiian agrobiodiversity memories
I came across an evocative little piece in The Garden Island on Sunday, thanks to a Google alert. It’s about an upcoming course on permaculture design that will be looking in depth at the ahupua’a, the old Hawaiian practice of land subdivision and management.
To ensure adequate space for forests and agriculture in each ahupua’a, pre-colonial Hawaiian communities applied careful land-use planning. Valley floors, where the most fertile soil is concentrated, were reserved for agriculture. They often included walled-terraces developed to grow kalo (taro), the most important staple food crop for Hawaiians. Houses were built on hillsides and in sandy areas in order to save prime agricultural lands. As contemporary Kaua’i attempts to move towards more self-sufficient communities, we can look towards this model of reserving prime agricultural lands for agriculture to perpetuate our ability to feed ourselves.
The piece reminded me of a visit I made with the family to the Limahuli Garden and Preserve on Kaua’i. It’s a beautiful place, explicitly organized around the ahupua’a concept.
And it even maintains small collections of different varieties of local root crops such as taro and sweet potato. Which was mainly why I was there. Although the visit came too late to allow me to include the data in the directory of Pacific collections. Maybe the next edition…
