Speaking of “special products” from agricultural biodiversity, check this out.
Horticulture and the city
There’s a great feature in the latest New Agriculturist on urban horticulture, with stories ranging from growing food in buckets in Lima to grafting tomatoes on eggplant roots in Vietnam to producing jasmine in the Philippines.
Hmong farming in Fresno
I’m fascinated by stories about farmers who insist on continuing to grow their traditional crops in unfamiliar or unusual surroundings. They speak to the strength of traditional food cultures, quite apart from representing interesting case studies in on-farm conservation. So I was sad to read this piece about the problems being encountered by Hmong farmers from Vietnam as a result of a recent cold spell in California. I’m sure they’ll cope in the short term, but it doesn’t look like this weird cultural outlier will last beyond the lifetime of the present farmers. All their children seem to be on scholarships to fancy universities. Although, perhaps some of them will study plant genetic resources conservation…
Core blimey!
I spent the last few days in Portesham, Dorset (thanks, Lorna and Geoff!), which made it all the more weird to come across this article reprinted in a newspaper in Dubai, where I had to transit for a few hours on the way out there. But it does show that you can still discover (or re-discover) new things even in such a well-researched crop as apples in the UK. Of course, for every upbeat story, there’s a depressing one.
Veggies
USAToday looks at how farmers in the US are turning to “unusual” or “ethnic” vegetables to satisfy the palates of immigrants. Meanwhile, both local and exotic vegetables seem to feature in the urban gardens of Caracas.