Markets

May 20, 2016May 19, 2016

Baobabs and palms for sale

Just a quick follow-up to my post a few days back on the Madrid botanical garden. There is a small shop at the entrance, and you can get some pretty weird plants there, like baobabs, for instance, of all things. Not, alas, any of the local grapes and olives on display within. Which seems like an opportunity missed. Some of those olives could even be xylella-resistant.

shop

May 19, 2016May 19, 2016

Nibbles: Botanical gardens, Glass flowers, Remarkable trees, Rhubarb history, Expensive pumpkin, Back to the future, Quinoa glut, Citrus greening biocontrol

All of BGCI’s ex situ surveys on one cool page. Have they re-modelled their website?
Harvard’s glass flowers are totally cool.
The world’s coolest trees.
Rhubarb is cooler than you think.
I’m not sure paying over a thousand pounds for a pumpkin seed is all that cool.
Conventional breeding is cooler than genetic engineering. Cool quote of the week: “I tell my students they should drop acid before they go to the field, and just look at the plants and let them tell you what they are doing.”
Is the coolness over for quinoa? Jeremy unavailable for comment.
Cool Pakistani bug may help with citrus greening in the US. But don’t stop looking for resistance, y’all.

May 18, 2016May 18, 2016

Nibbles: GRIN-Global, Old gardens, Grain buildings, Roman eating, Armenian wine, Coffee GI, PAPGREN, Tamar Haspel double

How to look for stuff in Chile’s genebank.
How colonial Americans gardened. And later built stuff out of produce.
How Romans ate.
How Armenians are (still) making wine.
How to figure out where your coffee comes from.
How the Pacific is saving its crop diversity.
How organic agriculture delivers benefits, and how it does not.
How GMOs deliver benefits, and how they do not. By the same person as the above.

May 13, 2016

Nibbles: Invader soup, Quinoa in the US, Petunia lawsuit, NUS for fishmeal, Craft brewing

They eat invasives, don’t they?
I’m afraid they do eat quinoa.
Too bad they don’t eat petunias.
Fish eat all kinds of things now.
Beer or bread? Uhm, let me ponder that one…

May 10, 2016

Nibbles: Banning bars, New genomes, Pepper revolution, Participatory breeding, Organic mead, Paying for breeds, Punica breeding, Cyperus in Egypt, Adansonia in Uganda, Cyclone trees

“Friends don’t let friends make bar plots.” Of course they don’t.
Friend also don’t let friends hype the carrot and cassava genomes.
“The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper. And he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight:”  chili con China.
Salvatore Ceccarelli, who should know, on the centrality of seed. And the guys from Experimental Farm Network would agree.
Yes, you can now have organic tej.
“In theory…the undoubted value of these natural treasures should be reflected in their price, which should rise steeply as they become scarcer… In practice, natural assets are often hard to price well, if at all.”
A “Himalayan solution” for pomegranate breeding.
Nutsedge definitely needs a new name.
First formal record of the baobab in Uganda.
Wind-resistant tree germplasm for the Pacific. Much needed.