- Just in time. Agriculture and Rural Development Day 2010 now has RSS.
- “It wasn’t debilitated in any way.” World’s oldest beer and wine drunk.
- Zambian farmers buy seeds, fertilisers and herbicides by mobile phone. What could possibly go wrong?
- Red bees! A little too much biodiversity to blame? h/t Tasting Cultures
Mystery plant; can you help?
To Ferrara for the weekend, and two plant ID mysteries.
In the Castello di Ferrara — a wondrous building — is a room dedicated to court banquets and the like. It featured extracts from an early how-to guide, Giovanni Battista’s Dello Scalco, published in 1584. There were also enlargements of images to do with food and banquets. Actually, the entire castle exhibit made great use of enlarged images, which worked rather well, I thought. But I digress. Among the images was the one I reproduce below.
“Whisky foxtrot tango,” I thought to myself. What is it? Could it possibly be a horned melon, kiwano, or Cucumis metuliferus? Hard to say. But having taken a snap of that and the frontispiece of the book, I figured I’d be able to find out later. 1 It was not to be. Despite finding a gloriously usable scanned copy of the book, I couldn’t see any plates. And if it wasn’t from that book, I wasn’t sure where to look. Another manual from the same time didn’t have any plates either.
Of course I sent it to my friend Mr Peanut, who sent it to some of his cucurbit friends, and an answer may yet arrive. In the meantime, however, what can you tell me about it?
Good harvest at Berry go Round
There’s a good harvest of ag-related posts up at the latest edition of Berry Go Round, the blog carnival about plants. There’s cotton, and cranberries, and diversity on ranchland, and elderberry wine, and barley domestication. In fact, our post on gap-filling is probably the least agricultural thing there. Anyway, scoot on over, and say we sent you.
Nibbles: Horticulture, Phylogeny, Wheat stripe, Chaffey, Shrubs, AnGR, Spirulina, Capparis, Cricetus, Biofortification
- Online map of horticultural projects. Mash it up with the CGIAR map, anyone?
- Evolution and taxonomy of crop groups: Annonaceae and Allium.
- Dealing with wheat stripe in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Some good news there.
- Nigel Chaffey does his usual thing. Inimitable.
- Today’s thing on what Africa needs for this Greener or Double Green or whatever Revolution everyone wants it to have.
- Latest from FAO on what’s happening in livestock genetic resources conservation around the world.
- And the latest wonder food. I’ll pass, thanks.
- Improving capers through radiation. One of those things where you have to wonder whether it’s really all worth it.
- The genetic diversity of the Polish common hamster. Wait, what?
- Biofortified crops to the rescue. Again. Gotta wonder about overexposure. The backlash, when it inevitably comes, is going to be a doozy.
Nibbles: Milk deaths, Peas, Botany, Mixed cropping
- The perils of industrial agriculture‘s race to the bottom.
- Heirloom veg nuts play with gene jockeys and everybody wins.
- The roadside botanist, bananas and cassava biodiversity.
- Biodiversity can support a greener revolution in Africa; fine paper. Ignore the press release; it’s rubbish.