Nibbles: Adaptation, Vegetables, Wood, Allotment, Earthworms, Salmon, Bees, Malaria, Potatoes, Apples

Nibbles: Community forestry, Fresh water, Salinity, Seed systems, Acacia, Iron, Cambodia

Rice vs millet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmHUsVlc8yY

We’ve mentioned before the efforts to support millet cultivation among the Hill Tribes of India. There’s even a BBC documentary about the work. The above video is not from the Kolli Hills, but the problem it illustrates is the same. Rice subsidies and mining are threatening the way of life of the Dongria Kondh.

Living Farms works with them to ensure availability of food for the entire year. This is being done by re-establishing their traditional farming system, by conserving the biodiversity of millet and uncultivated food.

Nibbles: Venezuela, Bangladesh, Climate change, Geographic indications, Dried herbs, Maize, Cydonia, Snakes, Hawaii, Pinot passion

Back to the wild

As promised, the new BGjournal is out, and the topic is “Ecological restoration and the role of botanic gardens.” Remember, this is the one with the paper on inter situ conservation:

One of the first places that this idea has caught on is on the properties of the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) and those of collaborating landowners. At Lāwa’i-kai, the uniquely beautiful coastal property managed by NTBG as part of the historic Allerton Gardens on Kaua`i’s south shore, just a few kilometers from Makauwahi Cave, invasive vegetation has been removed from the beach strand and coastal forest and replaced with not just the three hardy native plant species that had persisted there, but dozens of other natives that cores collected from the adjacent marsh as well as the detailed record from other sites along the south shore such as Makauwahi shows were there when the Polynesians arrived a little more than a millennium ago.