- Paan unwrapped — betel leaf, areca nut.
- “We were suffering; we had no food to eat so we tried to make a garden.”
- IITA comes up with technique to propagate yams through vine cuttings using carbonized rice husks as growth medium. Worlds beats path to Ibadan.
- The Virgin Fresh Apicultural Project is cool, but needs a new name.
- Sorghum makes big move from wallboards to gas and booze.
- Great Witley sweeter than Peruvian. No, not weed, dude.
- The vicuna: use it or lose it. They did, so they didn’t.
Nibbles: Kenya vegetables, Diet diversity, Armyworms
- Slumdog Veggiegrower. Via.
- Australians contend diets need to be diverse. Another shrimp placed on barbie.
- Great summary of the Liberian “armyworm” situation from CABI. And they say taxonomy is boring.
What would Thomas Jefferson do?
Polling is now open for the post of White House Farmer, the person who would be entrusted with digging up that precious lawn in order to grow fresh food for the First Family. There’s just one teeny problem. POTUS hasn’t said he wants his lawn dug up.
Youth being recalcitrant about veggies
The Journal of the American Dietetic Association has a paper ((Impact of garden-based youth nutrition intervention programs: A review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Volume 109, Issue 2, Pages 273-280. R. Robinson-O’Brien, M. Story, S. Heim.)) which goes all meta on projects which aimed to encourage kids to eat more fruit and vegetables by getting them to work in gardens, for example at school. It covers the period 1990-2007, but only US-based studies, alas. I’m trying to get hold of the paper, but from the abstract it seems that the best that can be said about such interventions is that they may have a nutrition impact. We have blogged about how people are using school gardens etc. to educate yoofs about the importance of agrobiodiversity: it’s kind of sad to see that it is not entirely clear if the message is getting through.