- No member of the plant kingdom has ever been so willfully and stubbornly misunderstood.
- EU funds US$ 300 million to develop galip nut (Canarium indicum) in New Britain.
- Happy Birthday, Fort Collins.
- First, pocket pigs. Now, mini-cows. Watch our hits go through the roof.
- The story of the mother who went to Hell to protect her daughter.
- Kiribati to get atoll agriculture development centre. But where will they put it?
Nibbles for the road: Baobab, Breeding, Gardening, Earthworms, Taro, Pollinators, Llama, Trees, Chili peppers
- More on how the baobab is coming to Europe.
- Review of breeding for nutritionally improved crops.
- Book on the origins of British gardening.
- Earthworms “modulate the competition between grasses and legumes.”
- ACIAR publishes book on taro pests in the Pacific.
- UNEP launches global pollinator conservation initiative.
- Unusual use for livestock fetuses.
- “And she grows more than 100 types of trees…“
- “Along the equator, without access to refrigeration, you could be dead pretty quickly unless you can find a way to protect yourself against the microbes you ingest every day.”
Tules to the rescue
Not particularly inspiring at first glance, but then I googled “tule,” a word I hand’t come across before. I figured cattails would be some kind of Thypha. Tules turn out to be types of sedges, although some people seem to use the words interchangeably, or indeed together. Anyway, tules have an interesting ethnobotany in the American Southwest, along with other geophytes.
Nibbles: Diversified farming, Appropriate crops, Alcohol, IPR
- “Sangeeta also runs a farm-field school to teach farmers about vermin-compost, mushroom farming, bee keeping and dairy farming.”
- For the majority of Afghan farmers and sharecroppers, poppy cultivation is no less than a desperate survival strategy.
- “… human fondness for alcohol comes from our past seeking of energy rich plants.”
- Geoff Tansey, one of the authors, talks about the patenting of life at the launch of the IDRC book The Future Control of Food.
Nibbles: Food, Organic, Halophyte, Aromatic, Botanical garden, Coffee, Verroa mite, Pastoralists
- What’s good here? I love globalization.
- An organic oasis in Egypt.
- Today’s crop of the future: Salicornia.
- English lavender?
- Florida botanical garden collects plants threatened by climate change.
- “Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua.”
- Fungus to help honey bees fight mites.
- “During our grandfathers’ time there were different types of grasses here, some for the cows and others for the goats and sheep. Now there’s no grass, the land has become barren.”