Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“[T]raditional vegetables are considered ‘backward’ and tend to be sold in poor neighbourhoods under unhygienic conditions.”
Er, yes, but that’s changing. So Kenyans who do want to follow the advice in a recent op-ed in the Daily Nation and change their diet should find it easier and pleasanter to do so.
I acquired four new varieties of sorghum seed in Bamako at a research station and divvied them up between five farmers. Each farmer was to plant five small plots, one of each new variety and then the local variety as a control. From five farmers, four planted. From four planted, three sprouted (one got eaten by termites). From three sprouted, two survived to maturity (one got eaten by cows). From two mature stands, one got measured (one got damaged by birds). And this was Yaya’s. Yaya, my shining light in M’Pedougou.
A Peace Corps volunteer shares a family visit and some thoughts on conducting agricultural research in a different culture..
I do hope the English dormouse population takes off. Because then the Brits could start eating the cute little things again.
It’s not really all that long since we brought together researchers on that overlooked portion of African agrobiodiversity that is its traditional vegetables for one of the first ever times. I wonder how many of us ever thought that in little more that 10 years we would be able to buy terere and managu and the like wrapped in plastic and barcoded in supermarkets in Kenya:
Or indeed buy nicely packaged and labelled seed from small agricultural suppliers in places like Limuru:
Preparation is time-consuming and fiddly, sure:
But the taste and nutrients are worth it, as more and more people are finding out. We had some Amaranthus for Christmas lunch, from grandma’s shamba. Can’t get much more mainstream than that.
The main building of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi has had a facelift, courtesy of the EU. Pretty good job on the outside, but the new exhibits were a bit of a disappointment.
There’s a big hall about Kenya’s animals, of course, and another series of displays about its cultures, arranged by life-stages (birth, youth, adolescence, initiation: you get the picture), though this includes very little about agriculture:
But there’s nothing at all on the country’s ecosystems and protected areas, and nothing on its plants, at least inside the building (apart from a display of an herbarium specimen in the small hall describing the museum’s history). There is a little botanic garden dedicated to medicinal plants (arranged by family, the wisdom of which is debatable), but this misses the opportunity of describing the Amaranthus on display as not just a medicinal but also a nutritious traditional leafy green (see my next post):
However, the entrance hall does have a terrific display of cucurbit diversity:
These bottle gourds are used by the Maasai and other pastoralists to store water, milk, blood, and mixtures thereof. Here’s a close-up:
