The diversity of leafy vegetables is being explored in a European-funded project that aims to make better use of existing germplasm. The project, worth 1.2 million euros, covers lettuce, spinach, chicory and “minor leafy vegetables” such as rocket and lamb’s lettuce. Almost 40% of the budget will be spent on characterizing and regenerating the roughly 12,000 accessions of the target leafy vegetables in European genebanks. A further 28% will go to evaluating the diversity and how it might be used to improve production. On that score, it is interesting that three of the 14 project participants are what one might call Agricultural biodiversity advocates: Arche Noah, Pro Specie Rara and Henry Doubleday Research Association. So I’m wondering whether any of the diversity that emerges from these investigations of genebank accessions will actually be registered on the EU Catalogue and of interest to those organisations’ members.
Horticulture and the city
There’s a great feature in the latest New Agriculturist on urban horticulture, with stories ranging from growing food in buckets in Lima to grafting tomatoes on eggplant roots in Vietnam to producing jasmine in the Philippines.
Traditional vegetables update
We finally managed to get up to grandma’s farm at the weekend, so I was able to checkup on my vegetables “experiment”. The photo shows (from the left), two varieties of Amaranthus the seeds of which I got from a market, a variety of Solanum, and a population of Amaranthus derived from seeds we collected from weedy plants on the farm. The Solanum is not doing so well so we weeded it thoroughly and made sure it was taken care a bit more, in particular through watering. The local Amaranthus population is lagging behind the market seed, but doing ok. One of the market varieties (white seeded) is doing better than the other (black seed). We’ve got one harvest off these last two already. Let’s see how long they last.
Broadening the genetic base of cucumbers
An American cucumber breeder, Jack Staub, is collaborating with Chinese scientists to bring fresh DNA into the modern cucumber. The hope is that this will give new cucumber varieties the genetic breadth to withstand droughts and diseases. The story started 12 years ago, when Staub crossed domestic cucumbers with a newly-discovered wild Chinese variety. It wasn’t easy to get the results of the cross to grow, but now the hybrids are being evaluated to see what they might contribute to domestic cucumbers. The next step, says Staub, is to cross the cucumber with wild melons, which are closely related and which might also be able to donate valuable traits to the crop.
The story is just one of several about vegetable breeding in the latest USDA magazine.
An appreciation of the importance of crop diversity
There’s an important post entitled Vegetables of Mass Destruction over at The Daily Kos, a blog. Important not so much for the content, most of which is familiar, well-meaning and just a tad parochial, but for the location. The Daily Kos is one of the most popular sites in the blogosphere, averaging around half a million visits a day. If just some of those readers go away with a slightly better appreciation of the value of agricultural biodiversity, that will be A Good Thing. So thanks to cookiebear and The Daily Kos for their support.