Vegetables

May 25, 2009June 10, 2009

Verdura di campo needs to be identified

In the first warm days of early spring Caterina’s mother — from the generation that lived through the wars — still roams the fields in search of that wonder of wonders… le verdure di campo (wild “vegetables”).

I bet she does. Read all about it in ItalianNotebook, and you’ll be salivating within seconds, like I was.

But fight the urge to rush out and harvest the roadside verges long enough to read the comment made by Barbara Modica at 2:39 pm on May 24th:

In the spring, there is a weed which resembles a rhubarb plant, except it is smaller, has a green stalk and green leaf shaped and about the same size as rhubarb. My husband’s family (from Sicily) boiled the stems, discard the leaves, then breaded them and fried them in olive oil. They called them gardoni (or something similar to that). Are you familiar with them? They are only edible in the spring, later on turn into a tall plant. We carry on the tradition and our grandchildren love them also.

Any ideas?

May 22, 2009May 22, 2009

Sardonic grin greets paper on sardonic grin

Damn you, agrobiodiversity. Every day something new. For example, did you know that a plant is behind the phrase “sardonic grin”? Well, apparently, the roots of the word “sardonic” go back to Homer, who adapted the ancient word for the Sardinians “because of the belief that the Punic people who settled Sardinia gave condemned men a potion that made them smile before dying”? That’s from an ANSA press release which goes on to describe some recent research which purports to nail down the active ingredient of the potion.

It turns out to be polyacetylenes from Oenanthe fistulosa, an umbel. They “cause facial muscles to contract and produce a grimace or rictus.” This species is not cultivated, I don’t think, but a congeneric is: O. javanica is used as a vegetable in parts of Asia. So O. fistulosa is a crop wild relative, sort of. Anyway, the ANSA release doesn’t give details of the paper, but I believe it might be a February article in Journal of Natural Products by a group of Italian and Polish researchers.

One of the authors, Mauro Ballero from the botany department of the Universita di Cagliari, which is in Sardinia, had this to say about the significance of the research, no doubt with a sardonic grin on his face:

The good news is that the molecule in this plant may be retooled by pharmaceutical companies to have the opposite effect.

May 18, 2009May 18, 2009

Visualizing agrobiodiversity in markets

I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.

May 18, 2009June 28, 2009

Nibbles: Moche, Nerica, AVRDC, Black bee

Moche bean writing.
“For Liberia’s subsistence farmers like Jeanet Gay, however, the Nerica may not offer such a ready solution to their annual hunger gap – indeed it may ultimately threaten their livelihoods.”
AVRDC commits to the South Pacific.
“The Victorians threw Apis mellifera mellifera out of hives in favour of more industrious foreign species.” Now this native British bee is coming back.

May 11, 2009May 11, 2009

Nibbles: Adam Forbes, Squash, Native Americans, Gardens, Buffalo, Pastoralism, Primula, IPR

Global seed searcher Adam Forbes check in.
Filipinos greet new squashes.
Smithsonian special feature on the American Indian. Not much agrobiodiversity, but still.
Reviews of a couple of interesting gardening books.
Asian Buffalo Congress 2009.
Policies that work for pastoral environments.
“Farmers are being encouraged to graze fewer, rarer animals, and that means the fields can sustain traditional wild flowers. It is a sweet-smelling plant and cattle and sheep love to eat it.” It is the cowslip.
Case studies on intellectual property in agriculture and forestry.