AVRDC has a nice new website. You can subscribe to a couple different newsletters, and also follow the institute on Facebook and Twitter. You can buy a porcelain coffee mug and donate money. And there’s a decent RSS feed at last. The first thing that popped up when I subscribed to it was, almost inevitably, a fact sheet on the baobab. Yet another fact sheet on the baobab. Incidentally, I know I’ve already nibbled this, but also newly online is CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank, an “online resource with information for all involved in plant health.” Where, almost inevitably, you can get information on the baobab.
UK vegetable diversity safe
Readers with a long(ish) memory may remember some uncertainty a couple of years back over the future of the UK’s national collections of vegetable diversity at Wellesbourne. I’m glad to say the genebank is flourishing as part of Warwick University, with funding from Defra. It even has a Twitter feed, over which there is currently in course an interesting discussion of Cornish cauliflowers.
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
Nibbles: C4 rice breeding, Tomato genes, Fruit/nut wild relatives, Peruvian cuisine
- C4 rice: it’s really very, very complicated. And Ford Denison on the reason. Kinda.
- Speaking of tradeoffs, this tomato taste vs colour story is everywhere. What is it about the (lack of) taste of tomatoes that gets people so riled up? And I wonder what the ones grown in Alaska taste like.
- I International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops: the abstracts are online. Does it include the tomato. Nope, not getting into that one.
- There are several subtropical and temperate fruit involved in Peruvian cuisine. Right? Come on, help me out with these segues.
Nibbles: Beef, Dairy, Resilience and vulnerability, Seed systems, Irony beans, Genebanks in the news, Catch a fire, Amazon, Spanish gardens, Conservation, Work exchange
- What is the best beef in Europe?
- When was the first yoghurt of the Neolithic?
- How do you measure smallholder resilience? Or vulnerability, for that matter…
- How does this Kenyan seed story differ from this Malian one?
- How do you address iron deficiency in Rwanda?
- What’s the value of a genebank?
- There’s a downside to plant-derived smoke?
- So what’s the latest paradigm shift on that ancient-people-in-the-Amazon thing?
- How are the Spanish people coping with the crisis?
- How come those transcribed podcasting, medal winning conservationists still don’t get it?
- What are Ethiopians doing in Amazonia?