Nibbles

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?

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?

Seed savers: everyone’s got an angle, from Seeds of Hope and Change to Seed Bank Bingo.
Italian lemons enjoying a renaissance. In California, natch.
India registers Assam farmers’ traditional rice varieties. In other news, rice water “is also used as shampoo, according to community elders”.
US$9 million to “implement and evaluate four approaches” to controlling Striga in Africa. One day we’ll know.
Denver Botanic Gardens does amaranth.
Evolution of bearded pigs. Good to know. Good to eat?
Bioversity banana team guest blogs at Annals of Botany. But surely they have a blog of their own. No, wait…
Agriculture is bad for your health.

Poverty doesn’t drive deforestation. Discuss using examples from Kenya and China.
Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) position statement on “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.” Genebanks mentioned. Crop wild relatives mentioned. Information systems mentioned. One’s cup runneth over.

Advice to the G20: “hunger is neither the result of demographic problems nor just the result of a mismatch between supply and demand”.
Let there be chickens! Picture goodness from National Geographic.
How to cook yucca flowers. And eat them, obviously.