- Enjoying a mango, lychee or cashew? Thank the Eocene-Oligocene glaciation.
- A grand tasting of Korean kimchi, in New York next week. #wishiwerethere.
- The “Methuselah date” continues to thrive. How soon before we have a comparative sequence? (We missed an earlier report.)
- You know what else is thriving? The Crops For The Future Research Centre, that’s what.
- The home state of US winemaking? You’ll never guess.
- Fishing myths busted. No, not the one about giving someone a fish vs providing capacity building in a piscatorial framework. Carpe carpam!
- Kew builds a pyramid! Of pumpkins, settle down.
- A well-aged wine to go with those cucurbits? How about this 6000 year-old Greek number? I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.
- Nice enough story of cassava improvement from CIAT, except that it is missing the beginning (the genebank?) and the end (blindness prevented).
How to save seed potatoes
You may have formed the impression that saving your own seed potatoes (as opposed to true potato seed) is fraught with danger and liable to lay waste to the local economy. Fear not, it can be done, and while it is a bit late in the year for Northern gardeners to undertake, those in the South might welcome the news, and northerners can start to plan for next year.
It is true that simply saving the smaller tubers from your normal harvest is not best practice, because they may well be carrying diseases. Instead, plant a row of potatoes specifically to produce seed tubers. Keep a close eye on them, and remove any that do seem less vigorous or diseased in any way. Quite early in the season, perhaps late July or early August (in the UK) cut the tops off completely. Exact times will vary, so have a gentle root around beneath the bush and confirm that there are some small tubers there, and then maybe leave the plants another week. Removing the tops prevents aphids from delivering the pathogens they transmit to potatoes, and doing so early is a good idea because the aphids accumulate more pathogens as the season progresses. Dig up the tubers, gently again, because the skins might not have set fully yet, and don’t bother trying to get them too clean at this stage. Set them under cover but in good sunlight for 3–4 days, making sure there is good air circulation around them. They skins may well turn green. This is a good thing, as it helps to make the tubers go dormant so that they don’t sprout prematurely. Gently brush any loose soil away, label the potatoes and store them in a cool, dark, frost-free place.
Rebsie had a lovely post about saving her potato diversity some years ago.
A slightly more advanced technique, especially if you didn’t manage to set aside some plants specifically, is to plant saved tubers into a large pot, using a sterile soil mix, as early in the season as you can. When the shoots are about 20 cm tall cut off the top 5 cm. Plant these cuttings into more sterile soil mix and grow them on. They will have rooted within about two weeks and can then be hardened off and planted out into the garden. You can even over-winter potatoes as cuttings if you can give them a frost-free environment.
You can go one step further yet, and produce your own micro-tubers, but that takes a well-equipped kitchen and a modicum of know-how about tissue culture. Or a small laboratory. It isn’t difficult, but nor is it for the faint-hearted. My own feeling, having explored this once before, is that people with an interest in edible biodiversity would beat a path to your door for clean, healthy stock, if only you were permitted to supply it.
Nibbles: Traditional knowledge, Digital herbarium, Digital Vavilov Centres, Rice genebank, Lentil breeding, Breeding for drought, Native American trout, Musa revision, Millet and sorghum promoted, Phenomics revolution
- Paying attention to traditional knowledge to help with climate change … in New England!
- Two million New York Botanical Gardens herbarium sheets digitized, possibly including some crop wild relatives.
- Map your recipe, an entertaining way to talk about domestication and interdependence in the matter of agricultural biodiversity.
- IRRI follows up genebank video with genebank podcast. No idea why.
- Speaking of videos, here’s one on lentil breeding in Canada.
- Which I don’t think involved drought resistance there, but it probably did elsewhere.
- Tribes (not in New England — see above) diversify from trout. Alas freshwater not included in new global fish diversity hotspot map.
- Musa taxonomists do their thing.
- Millet takes on quinoa. Taxonomists would insist on calling it Panicum miliaceum. I think. Next in the queue is sorghum?
- Phenomics in words and images.
Facts are not sacred; values are
Scientists, especially young fire-in-the-belly scientists but also many who have grown old making a living at it, are often convinced that if only people understood (or believed?) as they do, those people would come to the “correct” decisions. I know, I was one myself for a long time. Now, Jonathan Swift and Upton Sinclair are my guys. 1 Increasingly, though, it is surely becoming clear that facts alone change few minds. Last week’s New Scientist carried an editorial to that effect, about climate change. Adam Corner wrote:
How did the rational arguments of science and economics fail to win the day? There are many reasons, but an important one concerns human nature.
Through a growing body of psychological research, we know that scaring or shaming people into sustainable behaviour is likely to backfire. We know that it is difficult to overcome the psychological distance between the concept of climate change – not here, not now – and people’s everyday lives. We know that beliefs about the climate are influenced by extreme and even daily weather.
What has that to do with me here? Consider this video (and do, please, watch it through):
To me it is utterly charming; amusing, entertaining, well-executed, high-quality. It pushes all the right buttons. Never mind that a farmer growing spuds for The Man is unlikely to have a Big Red Barn or chickens clucking in the farmyard. It is clearly OUTRAGEOUS that she is not allowed to save her own potato propagating material, or “seeds” as our scientific friends might say. And I’m pretty sure that is how it will be seen, and welcomed, by everybody whose confirmation biases it confirms.
Like me, wearing my hat labelled Communicator.
And hated by everyone wearing a Scientist or Policymaker or Seed Industry hat. And me, wearing my other hats.
There is plenty that I could say about both the content and the assumptions on which that charming film is built, but it would be folly. There is also plenty I could say to the Scientists and Policymakers and Seed Industrialists about making their own case, and that would probably be folly too.
So I’m looking forward to your comments.
Nibbles: Gardeners meet, Aussie wheat breeding, Sunflower Man, Crop phenology, AEGIS on rye, AVRDC birthday, Long tail, CWR talks
- 5th Global Botanic Gardens Congress coming up in Dunedin, New Zealand. Isn’t that somewhere near the Shire? And one garden’s engagement with agricultural biodiversity.
- “It’s 2050, and Australia’s bounteous wheat harvest has been saved.” You see, as a total amateur at this lark, I’d have started with that.
- Loren Rieseberg, interviewed.
- HarvestChoice using fancy remote sensing imagery to improve crop calendars, give themselves excuse to quote Byrds classic.
- European rye collection a little closer to reality.
- WorldVeg turns 40.
- Bellon and Ntandou-Bouzitou explore the tail. Talk about local innovation…
- Old friends talk about crop wild relatives.