…when you find the pumpkin (kahurura) plants defoliated to colour the mashed potatoes.
Nibbles: Granaries, Scotland, Heirlooms, Argan
- World’s oldest granaries. Storage predates cultivation.
- Scots go nuts for forested agriculture.
- “I pity the poor servers whose duty it will be to describe not only the vegetables’ provenance, but their pedigree as well.”
- All about argan.
Chile pepper domestication investigated
I haven’t read the paper on Capsicum annuum domestication by Seung-Chul Kim and colleagues in the June 2009 issue of the American Journal of Botany, but the EurekAlert piece on it is definitely intriguing. I was particularly struck by the finding that genetic differentiation between geographically distant populations is higher for the cultivated than for the wild species. That may be because people don’t move pepper seeds nearly as far as birds. Also, it seems this particular pepper should be included in the lengthening list of crops that were probably domesticated in more than one place. Need to get that pdf.
Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood
- European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
- Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
- Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
- The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
- The diversity of sauces.
- Cooking Flipper.
- Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
- Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
- “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
Nibbles: Plant bombs, Reindeer and caribou, Livestock wild relatives, Agricultural geography of North Korea, Cyclone rehabilitation, AVRDC, Kew, Organic, Farmers and climate change
- Jacob alerts me that our “throw duplicates of all accessions from an airplane flying across Africa” Gedanken experiment may be closer to realization than we thought.
- Reindeer in trouble. In other news, there are 7 subspecies of the things.
- Indonesia looks to its threatened livestock wild relatives.
- Agriculture (among other things) in North Korea.
- Buffalo distributed in Myanmar. From where?
- Local vegetables promoted in the Philippines.
- More inspirational stuff on the Millennium Seed Bank from Jonathan Drori.
- Organizations Involved in Organic Plant Breeding Projects and Education. Not as many as you’d think.
- “Learning centres” helping farmers identify challenges, adapt to climate change.