Category: Urban agriculture

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Floral glory

Kabul Flowers A fascinating post over at Human Flower Project takes as its starting point the different cultural aesthetics associated with different styles of flower-arranging, from the all-encompassing European “one of everything” to the zen simplicity of Japanese ikebana. But that’s really all just throat-clearing prior to Julie’s rhapsodizing on flower bouquets in Afghanistan. She wonders what inspired the Afghan style, and whether it has survived. “[W]ith all that’s happened in the past three decades, do flowers in Afghanistan today look anything like Ard’s picture from the early 1970s? Can an aesthetic this original and strong survive thirty years of war?” good question. I have no idea.

Flickr photo by Ard Hesselink, used under a Creative Commons Licence.

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Turning market waste into meat and milk

A recent paper  in Animal Feed Science and Technology 1 did a number on three different kinds of waste from the markets of Kampala, Uganda. Waste from banana, sweet potatoes and Solanum aethiopicum (African eggplant) were chemically analyzed and fed to sheep and goats. That way, the scientists could measure what the wastes contain and how much of that the animals could make use of. Turns out — surprise — that there are differences among the wastes and differences between wet and dry season wastes. Banana leaves and pseudostems were not all that nutritious, and African eggplant leaves were very watery. But sweet potato leaves were just right: “sufficient to provide the CP (crude protein) and ME (metabolizable energy) required by growing goats under tropical conditions”.

Which is nice to know, but not all that surprising, given that about half the sweet potato crop in China is fed to livestock. Of course, pigs are monogastric, while sheep and goats are ruminants, so it was worth checking.

Will this see the market people of Kampala bundling sweet potato waste for sale? Or maybe the farmers will grow the leafy varieties specifically for animal fodder.

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Garden Mosaics

Garden Mosaics is “a science education and outreach program based at Cornell University that has been thriving in more than two dozen cities” in the US and has recently spread to South Africa. Marianne Krasny, a professor at Cornell, kept a blog of her 2006 trip to southern Africa. I wonder what they think about urban fruit gleaning…