Category: Vegetables

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Gardens of peace and reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The project isn’t just about food – reconciliation and the regaining of trust are equally important. We’re working with people who suffered a lot during the war and our main goal is to bring conflicting sides together. We’ve tried to make a secure space where thoughts and opinions can be exchanged freely; somewhere people can be useful to both the community and their families.

The secure space is in urban gardens. Great idea.

The link to the Community Gardens Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina is wrong in the article. You can find them at their website and on Facebook. Go support them, even just by making seed donations.

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Promote better nutrition and self-sufficiency with a few clicks

The Cooperative Society in the UK recently launched a scheme called Join the Revolution. People submit projects and other people vote for them. Winners get money — GBP 5000 — towards their project.

A project I already knew about alerted me and asked me to vote, which I have done even though, to be perfectly honest, the proposal didn’t exactly set the heart aflutter. There’s another project in similar vein that is currently doing better, so I won’t link to that, but it isn’t hard to scan all the submissions and pick the revolution you would most like to foment. In fact, you’re allowed to vote for as many as you want, which seems a little odd. On the other hand, having clicked the few times needed to register on the site, it seems wasteful not to vote often.

There are some videos about projects which, I think, were funded in an earlier round. Here’s one I could relate to.

Are there any other Coop-funded revolutions we should promote? Other competitions?

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Central Asian melons

Melons by AudreyH
Melons a photo by AudreyH on Flickr.

Jeremy had one look at the map in the previous post and asked me whether it was possible that watermelon cultivation had collapsed in the Central Asia republics. Well, it has probably declined substantially, but clearly not entirely, as the photograph above suggests. You can read at length about the melons of Uzbekistan. And you can see below how things used to be, at least for other kinds of melons. Yes, old pictures of agrobiodiversity markets again.