Those of you who headed over to CIFOR’s Facebook page to see whether they really did link there to a piece from the oil palm advocacy group Palmhugger trashing Greenpeace, as I said in my Nibble of a few minutes ago, will have been disappointed. It has gone. When I tried to comment on it, I was not allowed to, for the very good reason that the thing was not there any more. No, really. I’m almost 100% sure I didn’t imagine the whole thing. Did someone at CIFOR actually read the article and think better of publicizing it? What do they know about Palmhugger? I think we should be told.
Buddha’s hands
Speaking of weird fruits, Kuriositas has a great set of pictures of Citrus medica var. sarcodactylis, otherwise known as Buddha’s hand, for obvious reasons. My own contribution to the genre (at left) was snapped recently in Hanoi.
Taro leaf blight in Cameroon?
The wires have been humming lately about a new disease cutting a swathe through Cameroon’s taro crop. It has been in the local news and on ProMed, as “undiagnosed disease.” There’s a discussion about it on PestNet, 1 and some experts think it may be taro leaf blight. There’s a lot of experience on TLB — and resistant varieties — in the Pacific now. They were acquired the hard way, through urgent necessity. Will they be called on to help out in Cameroon?
A different kind of pawpaw
WebEcoist has a nice series of slideshows on “70 Extremely Exotic Plants, Flowers, Forests & Trees.” Kinda silly, I know, but I’m a sucker for photos of weird plants, I guess. Anyway, the one on “Deliciously Exotic Plants, Fruits and Vegetables” puzzled me for a minute because the picture labelled “pawpaw” is certainly no Carica papaya. In my ignorance, I thought the term pawpaw was only ever used as a synonym for papaya. Well, it turns out the fruit in the picture is also called Hoosier banana, and is in fact Asimina triloba. Related to the cherimoya (Annona cherimola), “[t]he pawpaw is native to the temperate woodlands of the eastern U.S. The American Indian is credited with spreading the pawpaw across the eastern U.S. to eastern Kansas and Texas, and from the Great Lakes almost to the Gulf.” There’s a festival devoted to the fruit in Ohio in September. Interestingly, if you search Wikipedia for pawpaw, it sends you straight to Asimina. A Google search also returns mainly Asimina stuff, but if you search images you get a mixture of Carica and Asimina. The dangers of using common names.
Featured: Cassava
Matt welcomes the new word on cassava domestication:
Wow, thanks for that post! I never would have guessed bitterness would be important. It’s a good reminder for all of us not to get too ahead of ourselves in “fixing” other peoples ag problems.