Mainstream

June 22, 2011June 22, 2011

Vote early, vote often…

Many thanks to the World Vegetable Center for running a poll on Jacob’s seeds-with-yoghurt idea. Head on over to their Facebook page and vote!

Alternatively, because we are such Social Media Mavens that we serve even people who aren’t on Facebook, head on over to our own sidebar, over there on the right, and vote here instead. Or as well. Do people who vote here vote differently from people who vote at the other place?

You’ll note that we’ve modified the question ever so slightly, as we’re not sure how many subsistence farmers in, say, Mali, eat store-bought yoghurt. Even with free seeds.

June 22, 2011June 22, 2011

Nibbles: Median strips, Vitamin A, Mapping in Kenya, Chaffey, Small farms, Rennell Island coconuts, Sweet potato breeding, Acacia nomenclature, Crop models, Pulque, Fruits

Planting roadsides with natives, including crop wild relatives. And here comes the database.
Orange Maize: The Movies.
VirtualKenya really here. Mother-in-law beside herself.
Plant Cuttings is out. And all of a sudden I’m in a much better place.
Small is beautiful, farm edition. And as chance would have it, coffee farm edition. And urban edition.
Dispute at iconic coconut plantation resolved. Apparently there are some really unique varieties there.
I say boniato. For the first and last time.
Acacia on the brink. Easy, tiger. The name, not the genus.
We’re going to need a better model.
Pulque comes back. Never knew it had gone away.
Domesticating fruit trees in Kenya. Something for VirtualKenya?

June 21, 2011June 21, 2011

Bee good

Wait, it’s National Pollinator Week? Not in Sweden, alas.

June 21, 2011June 21, 2011

Nibbles: Cryo, Tree diversity, Agroforestry, Seed industry, Trigonella, Ancient MesoAmerica, Niche models

CIP’s high-tech genebank.
“The project’s eventual aim is to plant several thousand trees at sites across Perthshire to act as a ‘living gene bank.'” What, because normally genebanks are dead?
Millennium Seed Bank joins ICRAF’s BusyTrees thing. Which you can follow in about a million different social networking ways.
Conservation Magazine does a number on crop improvement. Wait, what? Conservation Magazine? Yep, and with teaching resources.
Fenugreek, barkeep, and make it a double.
Ancient chocolate and corn routes.
What species distribution models do you like?

June 20, 2011

Making the best of your European beach holiday

So you’re thinking of going on a beach holiday to the south of France. But you’re not sure where exactly. You juggle a thousand variable. Texture of sand. Colour of sea. Number of stars of hotel. Density of restaurants. Average price of wine in the surroundings. You know the kind of thing. A nightmare. But you’re also interested in crop wild relatives. Maybe you can get in some botanizing? Isn’t that the most important thing? Well, if so, help is at hand. Download The Guardian’s handy database of Swimming in Europe. Mash it up with GBIF data on wild Brassica, say. Voilá, pick your beach.

Well, it’s nice and everything, but hardly ideal. What you’d really like in choosing your beach is some idea of species richness, preferably in multiple genepools. GBIF won’t do that, so I suppose one would have to walk the occurrence data through DIVA-GIS, and then export the species richness grid as a shapefile and import that into Google Earth. Except that you need the Pro version for that, and my very precious grant from Google has just expired. But stay tuned. Don’t book anything yet. Working on it.