- Faba beans came before cereals in Galilee.
- Wine is not quite so old in Georgia, but still pretty old. But will they be able to genotype it?
- South Africa is a cattle melting pot.
- Getting improved wheat out there in Ethiopia.
- These seeds are definitely ready for their close-ups.
- Speaking of close-ups: Amy Goldman has a new book out.
- First forage clover genome. More and more difficult to think of firsts.
A sweet pea for charity
Thrive, the charity operating in the field of disability and gardening, has been named Thompson & Morgan’s Charity of the Year.
To start the partnership, a new sweet pea has been launched for 2016, with money generated from sales going towards Thrive training programs at the charity’s four regional centres and local community venues. The sale of the sweet pea aims to generate £10,000+. Alongside this Thompson & Morgan is also supplying £1,000 of flower and vegetable seeds to be grown at the charity’s three garden project sites at Gateshead, Reading and London’s Battersea Park, plus 2,400 litres of incredicompost and also incredibloom fertiliser for use in the planting displays.
What a great idea. And a beautiful crop wild relative too.
Nibbles: Tomato rhythm, Pumpkin poop, Domestic olive, Papaya deforestation, Orphan crops, Perennial wheat, Apple grafting, Australian genebanks, CIMMYT seeds, French genebank, Ethnic markets, Rice breeding impact, Biodiversity & services
- Domestication made the tomato run slower.
- Domestication saved the pumpkin from climate change, which had messed up its cozy relationship with megafaunal poop.
- Domestication may (or may not) have happened twice in the olive. No word on role of poop.
- Papaya trashing the Amazon.
- Orphan crops: their day is coming. But not yet?
- You mean like kernza?
- Grafting 101.
- Tasmanian forage collection joins the club.
- CIMMYT’s seed distribution operation in pix.
- How the French cereals genebank maintains quality.
- Medicinal plants in NYC.
- Yes, donors, rice improvement makes a difference.
- Biodiversity especially important when times are tough. Well, in microbial communities anyway.
Breeding locally for local cooks
I’m not sure if we’ve ever linked to the Culinary Breeding Network before. This is a bunch…
…of plant breeders, seed growers, fresh market farmers, chefs and produce buyers engaged in developing and identifying varieties and traits of culinary excellence for vegetable crops in the Pacific Northwest region.
It came to mind because they have a cool, very informative Instagram account, as you can see from a post from a couple of days back…
…and because of yesterday’s post here on how to measure diversity. As I tried to say at the time, sometimes, for all its faults, number of varieties can be a useful metric. And even when it’s not, the names of the varieties are often a lot of fun.
Nibbles: Seed Treaty, Grelo festival, Large tomatoes, Saffron collecting, Enset redux, Grassland diversity, Census 2016, Organic definition, Dalit seeds, Ancient wheat DNA, Ancient American farmers, Tree adaptation, Syrian crops at OFN
- What civil society said at the latest Governing Body meeting of the ITPGRFA earlier this month.
- Google Translate fail puts spotlight on the cruciferous crop I’ve always known as fiarielli but which is sometimes called rapini. Both names kinda suck.
- That’s one huge tomato.
- That’s one expensive spice.
- Rediscovering enset.
- Grassland biodiversity good for resilience to climate change.
- Global agriculture: here comes the data.
- Deconstructing organic. The word, that is.
- Empowering dalit farmers by recognizing their knowledge of seeds.
- That ancient underwater wheat DNA wasn’t so ancient after all. Maybe.
- It was migrants who forced the ancestors of the Pueblo people to move.
- Local adaptation in trees: what has it ever done for us?
- Another way to safeguard Syrian crop diversity.