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Housekeeping news

A couple of things. Firstly, a reader asked whether we could revert to a previous set-up on our home page, so that all posts were visible in their entirety, rather than having three in full and the rest as a couple of columns of excerpts. “I dislike having to scan sideways and click through to read fairly recent posts,” was the reason.

Well, I don’t dislike that at all. Nor does Luigi. But we live to serve you, our readers. So we’ll do the democracy thing again. There’s a poll on the right; pop on over and vote.

I’ve also implemented threaded comments. 1 “Wha,” you ask. It’s just a way of making it easier to respond to a specific comment without all that @Name hipster grooviness. Just click on the Reply button, and WordPress will do the rest. If there’s an outcry, I’ll de-implement it. But I don’t think there will be.

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Hard graft for Pluots

Rhizowen noted that it is possible to buy at least one kind of Pluot® in Europe. Graines Baumaux offers the variety Flavor Supreme® for €26.70. This is the same Graines Baumaux that initiated a prosecution of seedsavers (and merchants) Kokopelli Association because, by failing to register varieties, Kokopelli enjoyed an “unfair trading advantage”.

It would be very remiss of me to suggest that one could almost certainly easily graft a Pluot onto a normal plum rootstock, or even a dwarfing rootstock, if one were so minded.

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Airport ag

Luigi shared links to two recent pieces about food, conservation and airports. The first is an audio slideshow of urban gardeners who make use of land owned by the airport in St Louis, Missouri. I found it a bit fluffy — and we don’t hear directly from any of the gardeners — but there’s a place for fluff. The big question: do the gardens attract birds that might pose a threat to jets?

Birdstrike is not a problem for the other, an article about how the endangered El Segundo Blue Butterfly has made a comeback at Los Angeles airport thanks to a conservation project that hinged on providing the butterfly with its sole food plant, seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parviflorum). A buckwheat, eh? So, is it edible? I can’t find any evidence that it is. Or that it isn’t.

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Forget Cuba, we’ve got Detroit

A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.

Cost per calorie should figure in that definition too; either way, here’s a dream of an idea for greening Detroit, symbol of all that is urban decay in the US. It could happen, I suppose. But what are they going to grow during those Michigan winters?

Mark Dowie, the article’s author, “lives on an island floating in the Pacific” it says here, but I’m sure he has researched the topic as thoroughly as he does all his articles and will be moving to Motor City any day now.