- Breeding grass while high. Probably not what you’re thinking.
- When life gives you ancient lemons.
- Potato Museum gets new website.
- Mango gets a database.
- So do France’s genebanks.
- The oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America? I think not, but interesting nevertheless.
- Whiskey goes heirloom.
- Excerpt from Spencer Wells’ Pandora’s Seed on the Neolithic Revolution.
- Our occasional contributor Robert Hijmans sings the praises of mapping with R.
Where is Utrecht blue wheat from?
We have this beautiful wheat in our collection, received from Sharon Rempel. However, we cannot trace it coming from the NLD. Utrecht area was not a wheatgrowing area. In the early 1900s durum and emmer was not grown in NLD. If any one knows its origin, please let us know!
— Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands (@CGN_Wageningen) June 12, 2018
Can you help our friends at CGN? There is a wheat of this name in Genesys whose origin is given as Canada, but I can find no Utrecht in that country.
Botany schooled about crop genebanks
So, thanks to an invitation from graduate students, I was able to give a lecture in the University of Cambridge Botany School (as was) auditorium about 35 years after last listening to one there. A somewhat emotional experience. Here’s the talk, minus a cute though entirely superfluous Google Earth zoom into the Svalbard Vault because that made it too big for SlideShare.
Where to plant chokeberry
Readers who were excited by the announcement of a new Plant Hardiness Zone Map from USDA will probably like the interactive version we’ve just been pointed to. Have fun!
99% genebanks
Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans — but it is also home to a vault containing seeds for virtually every edible plant one can imagine. The mountainside Crop Trust facility has thousands of varieties of corn, rice and more, serving as a seed backup for humanity. For each crop, there’s an envelope with 500 seeds.
Nice podcast, as ever, and glad they removed the reference to coconuts in the text, originally in there with rice and corn.