- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
Nibbles: Bamboo, Methane, Obama, Pests
- Fiat ghost paper. From bamboo.
- “If a cow burps, how do you measure it?“
- Recruiting drive: “I want you to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own home and your own communities.”
- “Insects and humans compete for food.” Say it isn’t so, Lubin Library.
2nd International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture
…took place in Bologna last week. The programme looks interesting. Anyone out there go? The abstracts will be on Acta Horticulturae in due course. Via.
Trading farming places
The BBC World Service has a new radio documentary out soon called “Farm Swap.” The conceit is you take a farmer and you plonk him or her into a completely different farming situation. An Ecuadorian organic farmer goes to Hawaii and an English potato farmer goes to Eastern Europe, judging from the brief on-air adverts, but there are no details at all on the website yet. I’m not sure if this is a one-off or a series, but I hope the latter, as it sounds like fun. Especially if subsistence farmers are included, say maize farmers in Kenya and Mexico exchanging experiences, or coconut farmers in India and Ghana. Not enough of that goes on, I think. It would also be nice to see what a particular British allotment gardener would do in another milieu.
Nibbles: Guerrilla gardening, Kuwait genebank, Satoyama, Salt and wheat
- From guerrilla gardens to guerrilla flowerboxes.
- “Kuwait needs to have a national genetic bank for plants and seeds by using the help of international experts…”
- Restoration of Satoyama and wetlands by local citizens in Japan.
- Lots of variation in salt tolerance among Georgian wild wheats.