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Where will all those vegetable seeds come from?

I haven’t seen official figures on production or acreage — I’m not even sure if they exist — but if internet buzz and celebrity hype is anything to go by we’ve clearly been going through a revolution in vegetable gardening during the past couple of years. Well, would you believe a resurgence of interest? Schools are certainly interested. Michelle Obama is, famously, interested. The next step will no doubt be the digging of tilapia ponds on the White House lawn.

Just today there were pieces on this from the US and the UK. But what I would really be interested to know is to what extent all these “new” gardeners, including the First Lady, are using heirloom seeds. Is there demand for them? And if so, is it being met by supply?

The Royal Horticultural Society has put out a call for heirloom vegetable seeds in Wales. Is it because it fears for their continued existence, or because enough seed is not available to meet sky-rocketing requests?

Seeds discovered through the scheme will be redistributed through local seed-swaps and also through the Heritage Seed Library run by Garden Organic in Coventry.

Given the recent news about the “official” national vegetables genebank in the UK, one does have to be thankful for things like the Heritage Seed Library, and its American cousin Native Seed Search. Maybe Michelle can be persuaded to Adopt-a-Crop.

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Fishy business

Is it me or has there been a lot on the tubes about aquaponics lately? There was the thing about growing cucumbers and fish in the badlands of Alberta. And that other thing about shivering tilapia in a backyard Thunderdome in the middle of snow-bound rural Connecticut. Classes in the subject at the New Vista High School. A youtube channel. And a blog, natch. Maybe it’s time to dust off those utopian visions of urban fish farms vertically integrated with up-market sushi restaurants.

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Head of UNDP in GMO shock

Public funding for extension services and agricultural research that improves productivity and yield had to increase rather than relying upon genetically modified organisms.

From the head of UNDP? What kind of a crazy mixed-up world are we living in?

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Invasiveness and extinction revisited

If you’ve been following (listening to?) our tweets 1 you might have seen this enigmatic little gem:

Population genetic diversity influences colonization success. K. M. CRAWFORD. Molecular Ecology: http://goo.gl/JFHh

And, possibly, ignored it. It must have registered at some level though, because when I saw Inbreeding bad for invasives too at C.J.A. Bradshaw’s blog Conservationbytes.com I thought, “Hmmn, I wonder if that’s the thing we tweeted”. 2 And it was. Bradshaw does a great job of explaining how it is that reduced genetic diversity contributes not only to a population’s risk of extinction, but also to its ability to invade new habitats.

Crawford & Whitney measured greater population-level seedling emergence rates, biomass production, flowering duration and reproduction in high-diversity populations compared to lower-diversity ones. Maintain a high genetic diversity and your invasive species has a much higher potential to colonise a novel environment and spread throughout it.

Of course, this is related to propagule pressure because the more individuals that invade/are introduced the more times, the higher the likelihood that different genomes will be introduced as well.

So far the experimental evidence comes only from Arabidopsis thaliana, the white rat of the plant biologist. But I’d be willing to bet that if you could measure such a thing as invasiveness and persistence for crop varieties, where people, rather than nature, determine how many propagules survive and spread, the ones that are both widespread and long-lasting are also the ones with the most genetic diversity.

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Worried in Tajikistan

The Guardian has a photo essay on how farmers are trying to cope with climate change in Tajikistan. 3

Turaqulov Saidmuzator, a farmer in Temumalik district, is experiencing the effects of climate change. ‘I think the weather has become warmer in the last four or five years and that is affecting our crops,’ he says. ‘The sickness of our crops is increasing but the pesticides are expensive and we are losing almost 30% of our crops to diseases.’