- New cassava varieties saving Zanzibar. Good to hear, though as ever one worries about what’s happened to the local landraces.
- Alder’s photos of the Potato Park. Do follow her travels around South America in search of agrobiodiversity.
- Namibia looks for other marula products.
- Saving the taimen in Mongolia. That would be a fish. A mighty fish.
- Interesting Indian symposia: wild fruits; “lifestyle floriculture.” Oh, to have more information.
- “Gariguette strawberries are an old variety and are non-licensed.” Crazy, eh?
Nibble: Conservation ag, Sahelian famines, Homegarden fertility, Annals of Botany news roundup, Carrot geneflow, Cyanide in crops, Texas rice breeding
- “…conservation tillage in Europe may indeed have some negative effect on yields, [but] these effects can be expected to be limited: the overall average reduction we found was ca. 4.5%.” Well I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Today’s solution for the Niger famine is fertilizer micro-dosing. I kid you not. But you should read that first link.
- Homegardens good for soil fertility. Well I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Nigel Chaffey’s Plant Cuttings. Priceless.
- “High outcrossing and long-distance pollen dispersal suggest high frequency of transgene flow might occur from cultivated to wild carrots and that they could easily spread within and between populations.” Transgenic carrots? Well I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Kenneth Olsen interviewed on cyanide in plants. Nice enough, but you read about this stuff here first.
- “Rice breeders seek yield advantage.” Do they now.
Nibbles: Wetlands, Cucurbit phylogeny, Herbology, Malnutrition, Fungi, India, Livestock, Ug99, Madagascar, Beer
- Conserving dambos for livelihoods in southern Africa. How many CWRs are found in such wetland habitats around the world, I wonder.
- Cucumis not out of Africa.
- Exploring “the connection between traditional knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants and media networked culture.” And why not.
- PBS video on malnutrition.
- Fungal exhibition at RBG Edinburgh.
- Indian Council on Agricultural Research framing guidelines for private-public partnerships in seed sector. That’ll stop the GM seed pirates.
- Conserve African humpless cattle! They’re needed for breeding.
- UG99 — and crop wild relatives — in the news. The proper news. The one people pay attention to.
- Vanilla lovers better start stocking up.
- Kenyan farmers earning money selling sorghum to brewers. What’s not to like.
Nibbles: Breeding, Art, Bison, Pumpkin seeds, Sweet potato, Bambara groundnut, Carnival
- Cary Fowler on the need to breed.
- MRIs of fruits and vegetables. Well, why not?
- The genetic consequences of bovine inter-specific sex explained. SFW.
- How Mrs Joséphine Enoce Bouanga makes milk from squash seeds in Pointe-Noire.
- Gates Foundation orange sweet potato project in Mozambique. Still waiting to hear what they’re going to do with all those useless landraces they’ll be replacing.
- Nourishing the Future does Lost Crops of Africa 101. Beginners, start there, but don’t expect to be taken anywhere interesting.
- Blog carnival Scientia Pro Publica #35 is up, but what’s with the verse alphabetical order? Harummph.
A different kind of pawpaw
WebEcoist has a nice series of slideshows on “70 Extremely Exotic Plants, Flowers, Forests & Trees.” Kinda silly, I know, but I’m a sucker for photos of weird plants, I guess. Anyway, the one on “Deliciously Exotic Plants, Fruits and Vegetables” puzzled me for a minute because the picture labelled “pawpaw” is certainly no Carica papaya. In my ignorance, I thought the term pawpaw was only ever used as a synonym for papaya. Well, it turns out the fruit in the picture is also called Hoosier banana, and is in fact Asimina triloba. Related to the cherimoya (Annona cherimola), “[t]he pawpaw is native to the temperate woodlands of the eastern U.S. The American Indian is credited with spreading the pawpaw across the eastern U.S. to eastern Kansas and Texas, and from the Great Lakes almost to the Gulf.” There’s a festival devoted to the fruit in Ohio in September. Interestingly, if you search Wikipedia for pawpaw, it sends you straight to Asimina. A Google search also returns mainly Asimina stuff, but if you search images you get a mixture of Carica and Asimina. The dangers of using common names.