Dave at Osage + Orange has got the early harvest in with a round-up of the best botanical blogging around in this month’s Berry go Round. There are trees, hedges, haystacks and much, much more. Go, read, link (and consider submitting to A DC Birding Blog for Sep[tember.
Turning stories into data
We have a new time-waster to share. Global Giving, a meta-NGO we’ve raved about before, has just launched its globalgiving storytelling project. Why?
We’re trying to break through the self-report bias that often prevents international development from having a larger impact.
With this community-based beneficiary feedback we’re identifying community-focused organizations, good listeners, potential innovators, and we’re breaking through the self-report bias that often prevents international development from having a larger impact.
It will be interesting to see how this effort develops, and what uses are made of it. Meanwhile, it is easy to emerge from a rabbit-hole to find that half an hour has vanished from your life. We searched on “seed” to get the Wordle picture above. If you find any really great stories that deserve a wider audience, why not share them in a comment here?
Nibbles: Gossypium, Helianthus, Cacao, Berries, Heirlooms, Seminars
- Cotton domestication deconstructed.
- Sunflower domestication deconstructed too.
- Chocolate smell deconstructed.
- Exotic (North American) wild berries deconstructed.
- “Heirloom” deconstructed.
- XXIII Regional agrobiodiversity seminar and the X Regional traditional seed market. The region being Contestado, in Brazil. Deconstruction not available.
Taking tomato improvement to the masses
It’s basically your standard I-found-redemption-in-a-tomato-heirloom story:
Another life somewhere in the pastoral wilds of Co Kilkenny, in a summer long ago, the wife of a Finnish jewellerymaker brought slices of tomato to the lunch table: slices a centimetre thick, a hand’s breadth across, jewel-bright with olive oil and scattered with chopped green basil. This simple revelation of what tomatoes should be, enfolded in mouthfuls of sweetness and scent, set my early hankering for the good life.
But this piece in the Irish Times did teach me something for a change. It taught me there’s something called the EU-Sol project “to improve the quality of the tomatoes and potatoes we eat.” But there’s more to it than that: check out the bits of its website aimed at the general public and schools.
Nibbles: Dutch soybeans, American flora and vegetation, Cassava pests, Bangladesh biocrats
- Do you have a small parcel of land in the Netherlands that you would not mind being used to test soybean varieties? Non-GMO, mind.
- Kew has a couple of new online resources on Neotropical plants.
- We need an international early warning system for cassava problems.
- “Is there anyone in Bangladesh to look deep into the workings of the biocrats who are bent on advancing the cause of giant companies at the expense of the people’s long-term food security?”