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Rainbow sweetcorn not so sweet

Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots reports on his experiment this year growing Painted Hills sweetcorn. to summarise, the plants weren’t very robust, the yield was poor, and the kernels weren’t all that sweet. (Perhaps he should try Red Miracle next year.) On the plus side:

Wow! Multi-colored sweet corn! Can you believe it? A variation of the famous Painted Mountain corn! Perfectly edible. Truly a visual delight, if not a tasty one.

Pat admits that it needs more work to thrive under his conditions, and that he’s not about to take that on, which is fair enough. Maybe someone else will rise to the challenge.

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Agricultural biodiversity and universities

Our friends and colleagues at Bioversity International have just published a 4-page briefing on Learning Agrobiodiversity: The importance of agricultural biodiversity and the role of universities. 1 It gives an admirable summary of what agricultural biodiversity is, what it is good for, and what is happening to it. The main thrust, though, is to present the results of surveys of how agrobiodiversity features in university curricula.

Bottom line: not so well.

If you know of any courses that the authors may have missed, we’ll be happy to pass on any information. And if you’re moved to organize a course and are looking for guest lecturers, we can probably help there too.

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Featured: Organic GMOs

Anastasia has a dream:

I’d like to see some transgenic plants that simply resist fungal infection, but that’s not organic – even though it would reduce or eliminate the need for chemical sprays.

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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. 2 “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.