Simple soup recipe

Preparation: 42 min

Ingredients: 6 Daucus carota, 6 Allium cepa*, 6 Solanum tuberosum, Allium sativum powder, salt, Musa spp.

Peel, boil, mix and enjoy!

(Kids thought there was Cinnamomum verum in it!)

* ~ 30 lachrymation equivalent

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Berry Go Round #36

Welcome to the 36th edition of Berry Go Round. The previous round occured at An Accidental Botanist, and the next will be hosted at the Phytophactor. I wish I had more time to elaborate on the many readings I was offered this month, but January is also the time of flu… So I’ll be shorter than expected. Also, I’d like to promise you a smart bulking of links arranged in topics and alphabetical ranking, but if a bunch or two seems not to follow any classification scheme, that would be for the super hat category.

Here we go…

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Open Lab 2010 finalists

I was in the jury for Open Lab this year too, and the finalists are up. These are supposed to be the best of science blogging for 2010, so these are elected good read and you may have good time spent over the links… Here is the list:

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Pollinated by…

Crithmum maritimum
Originally uploaded by Fergal OP

Just another pollination game.

This plant is Crithmum maritimum (Asteraceae), and grows in rocky shores. In most places it is pollinated by flies and bees, like any respected member of the family (botanical of course). In some place it is pollinated by an unexpected creature. Would you guess which one?

(Answer next month, after BGR has gone :)

More pixes of the species here.

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Great titles make greatest tilts

Just found the following title strikingly interesting (and yep, somewhat dealing with aspects of a promised post):

Oceanicity and the ecological disadvantages of warm winters

RMM Crawford – Botanical Journal of Scotland, 1997

I like oceanicity much. That would definitely qualify for the word of the week category. But I haven’t access to the paper. Does anybody do and would be willing to send me a reprint? Thanks! :)

 

 

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Tanguy Island Bioblitz (part 2)

Hum, it’s been a long time ago… Well, I promised anyway, so here we go. This post is still about bioblitzing. I keep up with blitzes, because this is what walks naturally look like in the family. And this time, I walked the shore until I reached this small island. Not a remote wild place, but definitely not the place people would really go a blitz! So once we’re done I can add a bold line in my résumé that I produced a listing of species of an entire island. There might be another post in the coming weeks when I’ll tell you about a sister species that I blitzed the very following day. It’s amazing because they each correspond to a different stage of the “heath to forest” community succession. But it’s slightly more remote and I almost had been stuck for a whole sea cycle. But let’s go back to Tanguy Island. I finished the easy part: the final stages with Bracken ferns and even the Pines understorey (they would probably be Oaks inside the land, but sea shores go Conifers).

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Berry Go Round…s

So I disappeared from the blogosphere a few days weeks months, and I didn’t advertised some very good Berry Go Round Carnivals. You can find the very latest installation (#35, a special number :) just there at An Accidental Botanist. Since the last time I hosted my prefered carnival (oh no, there are some other very good science carnival around :), you may have missed those at A Blog Around the Clock,  10,000 Birds, and Watching the World Wake Up (well, actually, you shouldn’t of course, since there’s a very blog to remind you about plants around blogs themselves : ).

Since I’m writing about BGR, I’m happy to tell you that I’m trying to come back, and to make sure it won’t just be whispers, I’ll host the next edition, due next January. But before that, here is a BGR festlink . I have to confess I just copied and pasted from a very good site, but nevermind… So here are the historical berries:

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