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Promoting civil disobedience one seed at a time

Luigi nibbled the World Food Garden a day or two back, but I think it merits a bit more of a chew. 1 At first sight it looks like a typically busy, typically overburdened site, with a very crowded map of all the gardeners who have already signed up. But if it delivers on what it promises, it could be a great resource. The thing that interests me most is a “Seed swap”. Alas, click on that and all you see is “Coming Soon!”. Well, I hope it is, and I hope it works, and works well.

I’ve been mulling a very similar idea here for a long time, and I even have it all figured out as far as wire-frames and flow diagrams and all that stuff goes. But I don’t speak Ruby 2 and right now I don’t have time to learn.

The need for an exchange mechanism is far, far greater in Europe than anywhere else in the world. To be honest, almost everything World Food Garden offers or is planning to offer already exists, especially in the US. All power to them, though for pulling it all together. Gardeners and small farmers can obtain the seeds of any variety they want, if it is available. European gardeners do not have the luxury of choice. A rational, effective seed swap system would cut the pointless European legislation off at the knees.

Which is exactly what it needs.

In the meantime, if you have or want seeds of something interesting, try Pat ‘n’ Steph.

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Berry go round comes round again

The latest Berry Go Round — “your favorite botanical carnival” — is up at Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: blog carnivals are a good way to expose yourself to something new, and there’s some nice new botany over there. But we also need to stay on message here, so I’ll single out two that deal with edibles. Verdure celebrates the bounty of autumn, while Laurent at Seedsaside treats us to a discourse on tomatillos.

While you snack on those, a question. Are there blog carnivals that might be of interest, that we don’t know about? Share, and we’ll do two things. Submit our own stuff, and bring back anything we discover there.

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Disappearing wild potatoes mined for drought tolerance

An article in National Geographic looks at possible changes in the climate of the Andes, how they will affect potatoes, and what breeders are doing about it. The wild relatives are very much to the fore:

“The crosses we are developing between wild, drought-tolerant varieties and modern potatoes now are for the future,” said Meredith Bonierbale, senior potato breeder at the International Potato Center in Lima.

The article also quotes our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis, 3 who recently collaborated with others on a paper which concluded that some of those very same wild relatives are themselves threatened:

“Even if we halt habitat loss, in the next 50 years, climate change could undo all of the conservation that we already have,” said Jarvis.

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Wheat database heaven?

The USDA is promising people like Luigi 4 a get out of hell free card. Shiaoman Chao, a molecular geneticist, sequences and fingerprints thousands of wheat and barley samples sent to her by breeders around the country. The results can help breeders to decide whether a particular seedling is worth persevering with.

But those data on their own become much more valuable when they can be married to other kinds of information from other kinds of laboratory. Enter GrainGenes, “a treasure trove of genetic information about wheat, barley and other ‘small grains’ like rye, oats and triticale”.

Personally, I don’t have the knowledge to make use of GrainGenes, or any of the other massive portals dedicated to just a few crops each: maize, strawberry, potato and others. But there is help out there.

The bigger question is the extent to which all those portals can be brought together and interlinked with other kinds of data: where selections grow, their visible characteristics, their utility, etc. etc. I know there are people coming at this from the non-molecular side of things, but I do sometimes wonder whether they really have the chops (and the resources) to pull it off. If some of the gene-jockeys decided they wanted to do it, and could throw some of their brains, brawn and bucks at the problem, I reckon Luigi would have his lifeline sooner. And it might be more reliable.