- 5th Global Botanic Gardens Congress coming up in Dunedin, New Zealand. Isn’t that somewhere near the Shire? And one garden’s engagement with agricultural biodiversity.
- “It’s 2050, and Australia’s bounteous wheat harvest has been saved.” You see, as a total amateur at this lark, I’d have started with that.
- Loren Rieseberg, interviewed.
- HarvestChoice using fancy remote sensing imagery to improve crop calendars, give themselves excuse to quote Byrds classic.
- European rye collection a little closer to reality.
- WorldVeg turns 40.
- Bellon and Ntandou-Bouzitou explore the tail. Talk about local innovation…
- Old friends talk about crop wild relatives.
Nibbles: Bees, Okra, Horsemeat, Monoculture, CWRs mapped, Barley, PB&J
- Colony collapse disorder. It’s still complicated.
- The Botanist in the Kitchen is at it again, with an in-depth treatment of okra, slime and chocolate.
- But seriously, why don’t Anglo-Saxons eat equids? It’s all down to religion.
- Nigeria embraces UNCTAD report that warns against monoculture.
- An interactive map of crop wild relatives. If it showed barley too, I know someone who would be in heaven.
- As so often in these matter, Kew comes to the rescue.
- A history of the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. My kind of dietary diversity.
Nibbles: Chickens, Markets x 2, Bananas, Cover crops, Pyramid foods, Beans, Maize, Austrian diversity, Tuberous legume, Natural wine, Figs and mulberries, Meetings x 3, Purple sweet potatoes, Bambusetum
- Backyard chickens too much hassle? We have the solution for you.
- Supplies go up, prices go down. Those pesky speculators had nothing to do with it.
- Prices go up … The story for India’s agrciultural labourers.
- Colombia’s loss will Ecuador’s gain. Predictions for bananas in the 2060s.
- Conventional farmer loves cover crops. Shurely shome mishtake.
- Building the pyramids. It’s a tough job, but at least you eat well.
- Beans with benefits. On the road with a breeder in Rwanda.
- Chinese maize diversity explored, a bit.
- Massive diversity of all sorts of thing, in German.
- Rhizowen has another favourite underutilised legume crop: Amphicarpaea bracteata subsp edgeworthii.
- It’s vino, but is it natural?
- How is a fig like a mulberry? The Botanist in the Kitchen explains.
- Capturing wild relative and landrace diversity for crop improvement. A conference, in June 2014.
- Agricultural Biodiversity Community @ Work. A conference, in June 2013. PENHA was there.
- Preparations are underway for Kew’s Great Seed Swap. Call me dumb, but I cannot see a date anywhere there.
- Purple sweet potatoes to dye for.
- Oh boy! A regional genebank for bamboo. A bambusetum, no less.
Nibbles: Lathyrism, Ancient maize, Sustainable cacao, Bioversity on agrobiodiversity, Weird fruits, Carrot seed, Palm wine, Buckwheat, Halophytes issue, Weird(ish) crops, Urban malnutrition, Old oranges, Molasses, Indian tree institute
- An ODAP detective story.
- Ancient maize gets a map.
- Diversity is the key to sustainable cacao.
- New Bioversity DG answers the tough questions.
- Be the first on your block with an unusual fruit tree.
- How to grow awesome carrot seed.
- The hard life of Nigerian wine tappers.
- Bringing back buckwheat in Bhutan.
- Annals of Botany to do halophytes.
- Come down to earth with the realization that most people have never heard of cowpea and cassava. Would they have heard of black-eyed peas and tapioca, though?
- Big report on urban malnutrition. Maybe cassava (see above) can help?
- The last orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. No word on what the variety might be.
- All about molasses.
- Indian tree breeding institute, and accompanying genebank, get a write-up.
- Yes, I know that I could have done a better job of pointing out the connections among some of these things, but it’s been a long week.
Si huele a caña, tabaco y brea…
Our friend and colleague Colin Khoury knows a lot about crop wild relatives…
…but he’s a man of many parts, another one of which involves salsa dancing. I can’t locate a video of him strutting his stuff on a Cali dancefloor, but here’s the next best thing, his thoughts on the nexus of salsa and agrobiodiversity, courtesy one of CIAT’s myriad blogs.