Category: Vegetables

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Tracking down P efficient brassicas

In following up a recent University of Nottingham press release (nibbled a few days ago) on a project to breed vegetables with higher levels of Ca and Mg I came across an earlier, related project by the principal investigator, Dr Martin Broadley. This was to evaluate P-use efficiency (PUE) in Brassica oleracea as a model system. There’s lots of genetics, but also this objective:

Determine the PUE of up to 50 commercial B. oleracea varieties and 400 varieties from the HRI Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) representing a wide geographical and genetic distribution of B. oleracea and close relatives

And this deliverable:

A database of Brassica oleracea PUE phenotypes. This database will identify the range of PUE in modern varieties. This will allow varieties to be matched to their nutritional environment. The range of PUE found in accessions in the HRI-Genetic Resources Unit (GRU) will also be defined. This database will be delivered to growers, via a summary factsheet and subsequent consultation.

Cool, I thought. Rather complicated evaluation information on an important collection made readily available to users (breeders, growers, researchers) in a natty database. I had visions of Andy Jarvis and his crew mapping the provenance of accessions on soils base maps to look for correlations between PRU and low P. Problem is, though the dataset is probably somewhere on brassica.info, I wasn’t able to track it down in over half an hour of messing around. No doubt I’m missing something which is right in front of my nose. Alas, the link provided in the project final report seems to be broken. I suspect the data I’m looking for is lurking in the supplementary tables on the project webpage at Defra, but a bunch of spreadsheets is not really what was promised. Another soul-sapping foray into genebank database hell.

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Perennial kales in Ecuador

Where did that come from, I asked myself, as we looked around the home garden of an agrotourist lodge near Cotacachi in Ecuador. No, not the wonderful neotropical fruits, or the fiery Brugmannsia, or the tree they called guava that looked to me like a carob; certainly a legume of some sort. 1 Not any of the exotica that were at home here, but this thing, a brassica looking for all the world like a small tree.

Perennial_Kale.jpg

To me it looked like one of the perennial kales, or even the Jersey Walking Stick Cabbage that I’ve grown in the UK and seen in Basque country and parts of Portugal. On the other side of the path was a red-leaved variety that had a much more dissected leaf, a little like Red Russian kale but again growing like a tree.

Fortunately the lady of the lodge, Dona Digna, who has every reason to be proud of the accomplishments of her community, was there with us, and even more fortunately I had the services of an expert translator. 2 I asked how they used it, and was told that they picked individual leaves as needed, and that now it was not good at all, much too tough. OK, well then how do you get tender leaves? In the spring, we make new plants. How?

Digna.jpg

At which Digna snapped off a branch of the red kale and said that you just plant a stem in the ground. So it never has flowers? No, never.

So it really is a perennial brassica, not one of the walking stick types, which do flower and set seed. But that’s as far as I could go in my investigation. I have no idea how long the local people have been growing it, where they first got it from, or what they think of it. But it was fun to see something truly exotic in Ecuador. And maybe it could add a datapoint to a study that revealed a high degree of duplication among perennial kale accessions.

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Nibbles: Gary Nabhan, Poppies, Gates and Worldwatch, Vavilov update, Aquaponics

  • “His piped cowboy shirt and vest made my westy heart ache with thoughts of home, and the intensity of his commitment to bringing variety back to our land and our table was inspiring…” I bet it was.
  • “The briefing note apparently anticipates a public-relations battle over planting poppies on the Prairies.” I bet it does.
  • “You ask if the money might have been better spent supporting the dissemination of this proven knowledge within Africa.” I bet they did.
  • Cassava processing in Africa. Lots of people betting on this.
  • Vavilov finds enormous onions in Algeria. Who wants to bet they’re still there?
  • Aquaponics catching on in Hawaii? You bet.
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Nibbles: Légumes oubliés, Mazes, Poultry, Business, Roquefort, Herb, Evolution, Benin, Egyptian pigs, New York food, Cabbage pest control, Cider making