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Mystery plant; can you help?

To Ferrara for the weekend, and two plant ID mysteries.

Frontispiece dello scalco In the Castello di Ferrara — a wondrous building — is a room dedicated to court banquets and the like. It featured extracts from an early how-to guide, Giovanni Battista’s Dello Scalco, published in 1584. There were also enlargements of images to do with food and banquets. Actually, the entire castle exhibit made great use of enlarged images, which worked rather well, I thought. But I digress. Among the images was the one I reproduce below.

“Whisky foxtrot tango,” I thought to myself. What is it? Could it possibly be a horned melon, kiwano, or Cucumis metuliferus? Hard to say. But having taken a snap of that and the frontispiece of the book, I figured I’d be able to find out later. 1 It was not to be. Despite finding a gloriously usable scanned copy of the book, I couldn’t see any plates. And if it wasn’t from that book, I wasn’t sure where to look. Another manual from the same time didn’t have any plates either.

Of course I sent it to my friend Mr Peanut, who sent it to some of his cucurbit friends, and an answer may yet arrive. In the meantime, however, what can you tell me about it?

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Good harvest at Berry go Round

There’s a good harvest of ag-related posts up at the latest edition of Berry Go Round, the blog carnival about plants. There’s cotton, and cranberries, and diversity on ranchland, and elderberry wine, and barley domestication. In fact, our post on gap-filling is probably the least agricultural thing there. Anyway, scoot on over, and say we sent you.

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Breeding for resilience

Breeding for resilience: a strategy for organic and low-input farming systems? — a conference organized by EUCARPIA that we mentioned a while back — kicks off next week, and the programme looks pretty interesting. I don’t see any obvious ways in which the organizers plan to share the contents more widely, at least until the obligatory proceedings are published, and I hear that there’s no space left.

I wonder what it would cost to hire a couple of top-notch bloggers to cover conferences like these. 2

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Featured: Farmers with phones

Natalia, who runs a mobile phone service, could plug a gap:

We have a database of farmers all across Kenya – we know they location, what they grow and size of the farm. At the moment we have a database of 30.000 farmers, but plan to expand up to 100 k in the next few months. We are searching for the way to commercialise this data source.

And there’s the rub. Advertisers may wish to pay for that list, but would the farmers really benefit? Alas, for the purposes of building a public good, like a better distribution map, no-one is likely to stump up. But Natalia, just think of the goodwill your company could derive if you shared the data, suitably anonymized!