Plants, crops, weeds…

Cool stuff there at This Week in Evolution, all about domestication and reversion of traits in cultivated plants. Though the title made me think of another aspect of plants’ life, not quite that plants mating wild story-line, but the story of yet another natural (cultural) reversion… Maybe that’ll make some post next August…

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Food is next millenium’s challenge

If you have a subscription to Nature, this week’s issue is dealing with agriculture’s challenge of producing enough food as the world population reaches its plateau (apparently, this is to be expected around 2050). I’m just digging in, and it’s very interesting…

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Tanguy Island Bioblitz (part 1)

So this is my take on BBB 2010. I happened to be on the “Côte de Granite Rose“, a famous place (and certainly touristic during summertime) in French Brittany (note there are more pictures in the French version of the wiki page). One of the three places in the world where granite rocks are pink (and thus the name of the coast)(thanks Wikipedia!). I did not really know if or when this year’s spring version of Blogger Bio Blitz would happen, but I suddenly decide to go on a Blitz, during a walk.

Of course, circumstances were helping… I was walking on the shore, the sun was shining (only French brittons would tell you this was not that unexpected in June), okay and I missed Spring start this year and… I was about to reach Tanguy Island (just look at the satellite map).  By feet.

This might be a stereotypical biologist fantasy to go play a systematicist census game on a remote exotic island (maybe Tanguy Island is only something like 200 meters away from the Coast, but google doesn’t even know its name, nor does it make it appear on the map but the satellite picture) and come back with the first comprehensive species list of that island (if not species new to science!)…

The Côte de Granite Rose

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Bioblitzes

I’ve been reorganizing a bit my Flickr sets, and now pictures for Blogger Bio Blitzes are grouped in sets. So I provide here backlinks to previous blitzes, both pictures and posts.

Spent:

The first experience… Here (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvany). Link at Seeds Aside here.

The second run… Here & here (near Paris and near Rennes, France). Links at S.A. here, here & here.

Third run… Here & here (French Brittany). Links at S.A. here & here.

The reason I do that, is that apparently there’s been no Blogger Bio Blitz this spring so far, or I’ve not seen the ads or something else. And while I like the idea of blogging bio-blitzes, and since I’ve been some place in June, and had time and was willing to, and did it actually, I’m on my way preparing two posts on these blitzes from June, on two neighbouring islands (so I can pretend some level of exhaustive plant species listing, except for grasses as always :).

If you can’t wait for the posts, there’s a first set of pictures here. You can always try to guess where the blitz took place (hint, French Brittany –Gosh, there’s a quite big hint not even hiding after the link… So try to find the islands names!). Answer in a few days…

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Name that strain (train ‘that’ names)

So…

… Here is a potato emerging from the Lasagnas, early in May. It has a very sweet purple robe. The stem keeps this redish brown colour when the plant grows.

The leaves actually turn green, though paler than classical potato varieties.

Could you guess which variety this plant belongs to?

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BRG #29

Twenty plant things you must read today (if you haven’t already). Just here.

Oh and BTW, edition #28 is here and quite worth too!

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Lazzy’s Beds

I can’t say how it came up, but it did. One May day, I made Lasagnas, but not the kind you eat. Lasagna beds. For those who don’t know what this is about, Lasagna beds gardens have been defined as:

raised bed that, just as its name suggests, is built up in layers like a tray of lasagna. The students follow a recipe of layers including several kinds of organic material like grass clippings and soil. This is a nearly foolproof place to get things to grow because the soil conditions are ideal*.

I can’t say how exactly I learned about this fairly easy way of gardening. Maybe it came from lurking in here. And then I found out when looking for alternatives to tilling and so. And also probably because I taught students about pedogenesis and had to dig into soil biology. Seems like everything was set for me to decide having a try. Probably the most pushing came out of colleagues or family being way skeptical about gardening without tilling… Till I decided I’d better have a demonstration…

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See you!

I Cowm back! (just trying to get prepared)

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