- 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.
Getting one’s oats right
Luigi rapidly found me hundreds of accessions in genebanks around the world.
Alas, Luigi was looking for the wrong thing. As Axel Diederichsen succintly explains in a comment to Jeremy’s post of a couple of days back on naked oats.
The name Avena nuda L. refers to the small naked oat, a diploid species, while the naked oat talked about in this article is hexaploid and should rather be called Avena sativa subsp. nudisativa (with quotation of the authorities it will be: Avena sativa L. subsp. nudisativa (Husnot.) Rod. et Sold.). (Reference: Kobylyansky V.D. and Soldatov V.N. 1994. Flora of cultivated plants, vol. 2 part 3, Oat. Kolos, Moscow).
I had searched for Avena nuda, not Avena sativa subsp. nudisativa. Silly me. So it’s back to Genebank Database Hell for me. Needless to say, the subsp. nudisativa is unknown to any of the genebanks I checked, but that’s ok, because the hulless trait is a state in an official characterization descriptor for oats, and GRIN in both the USA and Canada allows a search on characterization descriptor states.
So now I know there are 375 hulless accessions in the US germplasm system and 262 in Canada, in both cases out of over 10,000 Avena sativa accessions. So my original statement turns out to be still true, though rather by luck than judgement. I know what you all want is a map of where those naked hexaploid oats come from, but that’s going to be really, really tricky until Genesys imports the oat characterization data.
AfricaRice’s African rice collection
Nice video. Note the reference, towards the end, to the systematic characterization of AfricaRice‘s collection of 2,500 Oryza glaberrima accessions. Interestingly, Genesys says the Centre has 3,796 accessions. I wonder what’s happened to the rest. Here’s a map of the 863 accessions from 129 sites with georeferences.
LATER: Compare with the map of African rice cultivation in Diana Buja’s post.
Nibbles: Cuba gardens, Dual purpose pumpkins, GRIN-Global, Wheat belly, Agroforestry, Zambian malnutrition, Libyan agriculture, Certification
- Visit Cuba with boffins of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. Well that sounds like fun.
- You liked naked oats? Get a load of naked pumpkins. Comments disabled for Manitoba farmers.
- Psst, wanna genebank data management system? Only slightly used…
- Something else you can blame your beer belly on: wheat.
- Have your forest and eat it too.
- Solving malnutrition in Zambia. I wanna know more about those “improved seed varieties.”
- And about these too for that matter: “…ICARDA is urgently sending to Libya seeds of wheat, barley, legume and forage crops for the 2011-2012 cropping season…” Incidentally, any news about the Agricultural Research Centre in Tripoli?
- Forest certification helps nearby Heritage Sites.
Core blimey: BBC does apples
The rip-roaring yarn of Indiana Appleseed in the Canyon of Lost Treasure in the Boise Weekly, when posted to Facebook, elicited a reference from Mike Jackson to a BBC Midlands news item about the hundreds of apple varieties in Herefordshire, and the role of Thomas Andrew Knight, president of the RHS from 1811-1838. That sounded really interesting, but the BBC website doesn’t allow me to watch that particular video clip here in Italy. Fortunately, Herefordshire Council has no such compunctions about freeing its content, which allows me to mark the fact that 2011 is Herefordshire’s Year in the Orchard before the end of the year in question, if only just. Having said that, the BBC did have an article back in June on the Great British Apple in connection with another programme, in which “[h]orticulturalist Chris Beardshaw uncovers the British contribution to the history of our most iconic fruit.” And it looks like I’ll be able to watch at least some bits of that.