- Why aren’t there more crops among the orchids?
- This pepper is not so much a crop as a weapon of mass destruction.
- Now here’s a crop. New tomato has taste, storability, looks. But I think it’s dating.
- Maize with cool amino acids reaches Ethiopia. Must have walked there.
- Really old squash seeds.
- Cary Fowler on the Weather Channel. You heard me.
- Quakers have an opinion on the right to food and climate change. Well, why shouldn’t they? They also have a UN office, but that’s another story. No word on whether they made the Weather Channel.
- Ok, so apparently the answer is data. Says a data company. And open data at that. Quakers nonplussed.
- Botanizing in N or S America? There’s an app for that.
- The rise and rise of gin. And I certainly need one.
Agrobiodiversity illustrated then and now
There really is nothing like photos of agricultural biodiversity to set the pulse racing. Well, at least in our weird little corner of cyberspace. It’s been crazy over on Twitter and Facebook, what with frenzied sharing of, and commenting on, a couple of stories about, of all things, watermelons. Well, it is summer, I guess: they don’t call it the silly season for nothing.
To recap for those who do not follow us on other media, 1 people seem to have really been impressed by the photos which accompanied a story on the sequencing of the watermelon genome. Although it dates back to three years ago, for some reason it resurfaced again last week.
It may well have been resurrected because of a Vox.com story on how James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, is using Renaissance paintings of watermelons and other produce to illustrate the changes that have been wrought by modern plant breeding. The story was later taken up by others, and bounced around a lot. And all long before National Watermelon Day. And also before the AoB post on watermelon origins.
Well, let me add to the hysteria. Courtesy of my friend Dr Yawooz Adham, here’s another fantastic agrobiodiversity photo, of tomatoes this time.
The farmer’s name is Shiek Jamally Karbanchi 2 and he lives in a village near the town of Chamchamal, between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He tends 22 different tomato varieties, and is clearly incredibly proud of them. Though I’m pretty sure he doesn’t charge Euros 20 each for them. I don’t know if they’re all commercial varieties or whether there’s a few local heirlooms in there, but either way it’s damn impressive.
Nibbles: Summer holidays, Tajik bread, Farm to pizza, Västerbottensost, Diverse bananas, Banana wine, Chinese agroforestry, Peak coffee, Responsible oil palm, Model chickens, Damn you NS
- Ah, summer and its funny medieval holidays.
- Making bread in Tajikistan.
- Making pizza in Sussex.
- Making cheese in (one village in) Sweden.
- Diversifying bananas in Queensland.
- Diversifying banana products in Kenya.
- Diversifying with trees in China.
- Better diversify coffee.
- I see your responsible soy and raise you responsible oil palm.
- Cocks of the walk.
- I’m so annoyed the New Scientist article on breeding less bitter veggies is behind a paywall that I won’t even link to it. Google it, if you must.
Prize for plants programme
It’s not clear whether it was due to her magisterial BBC programme Plants: From Roots to Riches, but Prof. Kathy Willis has won the Royal Society’s prestigious Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science to UK audiences. You’ll remember the programme features genebanks quite prominently. Well worth listening to. Congratulations to Prof. Willis, who is Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Nibbles: Barley domestication, Apple pie, Mexican food & drink, CABI, Old seeds, IT
- Secret of barley brittle rachis revealed. In other news, there’s a Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls.
- Bramley apple pie filling protected. But from who?
- Participatively bred Oaxacan maize finds a market niche.
- Have some tequila with that participatively bred Oaxacan maize.
- “We can call a government and tell them our data is telling us that a pest is on the way.”
- The coolness of seeds.
- Yeah but “[g]ood seed in the wrong place is no longer good seed.”