- Learn about CIAT’s reseach via the posters they put on slideshare. Couple on their beans and cassava genebank.
- Trying to speed up apple breeding.
- Biodiversity interventions find it difficult to fight poverty. How about agrobiodiversity interventions?
- More bad news: protected areas don’t work anyway. At least for trees in Burkina Faso.
- Boffins trying to spot contraband honey. There’s contraband honey?
- Gin drinkers told to start worrying.
- Forest of Belfast project to wind up, but not before finding really old oak.
Nibbles: Trees, More trees, Crops and trade, Pollination info, Anthocyanins
- Another day, another tree disease threatens the British landscape.
- Some Swedish trees are not doing too well either.
- Seeds of Trade. A virtual book at the NHM. Lots of info on the history of crops.
- What are the pollination needs of a particular crop? FAO will tell you if you ask nicely.
- Purple tea in Kenya. Luigi’s mother-in-law not impressed.
Recognizing World Malaria Day
As a victim, I am particularly happy to recognize World Malaria Day and hail the Cinchona tree, source of quinine. Artemisia is the new Chinchona, of course. I dread to think how many of the kids in this picture I took in the Solomons, where I picked up the disease, will get malaria, or have already had it. Thanks, Kew.
Nibbles: Amazonia, Potatoes, Seeds, Fodder, Sturgeon
- More insights into that early Amazonian agriculture.
- 24th Congress of the Latin America Association of Potato, Cusco, 23-28 May “will focus on the conservation and usage of potato’s genetic resources”.
- New book on seed trade and agricultural biodiversity. Tanzania not studied.
- Nice slide show on fodder shrubs for dairy farmers in Kenya.
- Wisconsin caviar?
Nibbles: Biochemistry, Tree rings, Soil, Lettuce
- Supersizing crops.
- Using tree rings to study past Asian droughts. I guess it’s just me, but I find this much more intersting than the thought of tinkering with the Calvin-Benson cycle.
- The mother of all soil data sites.
- That ancient Egyptian aphrodisiac: brassica or lettuce?
- The Sheep is Life Celebration is coming. Wish I was going.