- New seed bank on West Bank. This one seems to be a genebank. I think.
- Seeds and needs in PNG.
- ILRI PowerPoint on Ethiopian chickens. But 46 slides?
- Everybody’s talking about the new Landscapes for People, Food and Nature thing, so I guess we should too.
A tale of three cucumbers
You may remember my post of a few days back about the request on IdeaConnection for cucumber germplasm resistant to nematodes, Fusarium, CGMMV, downy mildew and cold, for a finder’s fee of $2,000. I did a few genebank database searches and didn’t get very far at the time, but a comment from the curator of the cucumber collection at CGN sent me back to their website because I had missed this crucial bit:
Searches can be made based on passport data and characterization / evaluation data or both. Only a selection of traits is on-line searchable, however all data are downloadable.
It turns out that the downloadable evaluation data for cucumber includes 3 experiments on downy mildew and one on Cucumber Green Mottle Mosaic Virus (CGMMV). So I got the Excel files and cross-searched them for material resistant to both diseases. The result is three accessions: CGN19618 (Taiwan), CGN21584 (India) and CGN22272 (Japan). The first two even have georeferences. The Japanese accession doesn’t, alas, but that would be my choice of the three for cold-hardiness. It’s a pickle obtained from the Know You Seed 1 seed company. That’s three out of the five traits. I think that’s worth at least a thousand bucks, don’t you?
Nibbles: Fish blog, El Guardabosques, Andean crops, Traditional knowledge
- WorldFish director has a brand new blog with a fancy Latin tag. Expiscor: to fish out, to find out, and discover.
- Cuba boasts home-grown Guardians of the Forests.
- Promotion of Andean Crops for Rural Development in Ecuador. No idea what this is or why it popped up now, but worth sharing anyway.
- Bioversity shares slides on The role of agricultural biodiversity in diets in the developing world: Improving diet diversity, quality and ecosystem sustainability.
- IIED comes out for traditional methods to cope with climate change. Could we abandon this sterile dichotomy, please?
Nibbles: Bangladeshi horticulture, USDA-ARS impact, NY native seeds, Spate irrigation, FIGS, Livestock trifecta
- The floating gardens of Bangladesh.
- So, USDA-ARS, what have you done for me lately?
- The story of Ed Toth, the director of New York City’s native plant center on Staten Island. In other news, New York City has a native plant center.
- Not all floods are bad.
- The Consortium discovers FIGS.
- Livestock genetic resources for the poor: The interview. And the PowerPoint. And the Fancy Science.
More on those parmesan-making Indians
Remember that story I linked to a while back about how Sikh immigrants to northern Italy are keeping alive the art of making parmigiano? Remember how it was in German? Ok, well, now you can read two versions of it in English. But it’s still pretty cool.