- 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.
Blogging the olive plague
It was inevitable, I suppose. There’s now a whole blog dedicated to the “Diffusion of xylella in Italian olive trees.” The latest post comments on an article in Nature which seems to suggest things are beginning to move in normally sleepy Puglia, epicenter of the apocalypse. Here’s hoping. But I still think they should have put like a hundred varieties out for testing two years ago, when this whole thing first started.
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.
Baby oil steps
Is anyone looking for resistant material?
That’s what we asked back in August last year, at the height of the Italian Xylella olive plague panic.
Then in March this year there was news of some 10 cultivars being tested. Now comes this:
An experimental olive plot with almost twenty different olive cultivars (24 replicates for each cultivar) has been set last week in the Xylella-infected area of the province of Lecce (Apulia, southern Italy). The 2-years old plants will be exposed to the natural infective vectors throughout the entire project duration. This plot extends the experimental field established in 2015 within a specific EFSA pilot project and including 10 different olive cultivars, whose evaluations will be followed and continued through the project POnTE.
Which is great and all, but why didn’t they put 50 or 100 cultivars out in the first place?
LATER: Oh, and BTW, did you know you can adopt an olive tree?