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

–

Read Full Post »

Kiwano (quick)

Kiwano is the fruit of Cucumis metulliferus, or Horned Melon. I have known the fruit for a long time without ever affording one (this was more because I couldn’t find it, though the price would have made me think twice before buying one). It is very attractive, with a bright orange epiderm and more or less redish circles and lines driving along the skin. The inside is quite green (which I didn’t expect at first and was really surprised by the colour contrast). The inside is good. The inside is inside.

Kiwano (open fruit, right nut to spot size)

Read Full Post »

Berry Go Round #22

Welcome to the 22nd edition of the Berry Go Round, a blog carnival devoted to all plants’ life… The previous edition can be found here. November brings a new yield of fresh plant science, and here it is:

Read Full Post »

Botanical exam gems

So here are a few gems from a student exam in Plant Morphology class (Anonymity is entirely respected since this is not mine anyway).  I acknowledge that this is a rather ‘private’  post since many (lay) readers may not spot the issue  or the joke in these answers to the test. I tried to add the basic background information needed to decipher the joker within. Let’s keep in mind that students are supposed to learn  and understand their lesson and a lower treshold in the basics is expected. It is, I think, legitimate to have a good laugh when the mistake is abysmal. Most of these gems are entertaining or cute, to a teacher (though they might drive them to despair). Anyway, some students do have a clear preference (not to say a strong bias already) towards animals but must take the class (it is not optional). It certainly doesn’t reflect their biological level but most likely their (lack of) interest in plant biology.

Warning: some jokes may be lost in translation…

Read Full Post »

BBB09/ Couesnon River

This is the fourth and last post on BBB09 here at Seeds Aside this year (you can reach #1, #2, #3, and even previous years following the links). Today we’ll sum up species met during a quick halt near the Couesnon river, next to Mézière sur Couesnon (satellite map).

Apple trees in a meadow invaded by Bracken ferns

This area is an underwood slope leading to the Couesnon riverbanks (actually, unused meadows slowing reverting to forest first). The trail begins with Apples (Malus domestica). The country is full of such trees (hedges are overcrowded sometimes), and these are mostly undetermined old population/varieties used to make hard cider (a regional specialty).

Most common local tree species are growing in there, so I count back Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur), Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa), and Common Hazel (Corylus avellana), to which I add bushes of the European Holly (Ilex aquifolium) — all Hollies had a very low reproductive success there, as I didn’t see any berry. Since the species is dioecious (males and females), this means either sex was short in the population, or that pollinators were not that interested. Actually, this is quite in contrast to a

Cliff that rocks (with Quercus robur)

recent population I’ve seen, where females bore thousands of fruits (another extreme for this species).

Of course, I consider many other plants to be already on the BBB list, i.e. Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum, maybe the first plant in French Brittany), Blackberry (Rubus fructicosus), Rumex species,  Common Ivy (Hedera helix, the plant protected against automn sunburn), and… hum, grasses.

So the meadows transforms into underwood with sloppy slopes until the river. At places, you get cliffs instead. Best to follow the trail where it wants you to go, to avoid falling short.

Finally, there is the small river (it is very curious for sa long as it flows through northern Brittany, this river never really turns into a big one, but stays of a quite reasonnable size all way long).

The Couesnon River (with Alders: Alnus sp; and Beeches: Fagus sylvatica)

Let’s enter a divide now, but an ecological, not a taxonomic one…

Read Full Post »

Anthrome

A new plants blog. Edible. (HT Further Thoughts).

Read Full Post »

BBB 07 & 08

– Though I did my two Blogger BioBlitzes on different continents, there’s one species that’s so widespread that I’ve seen it each year: Fragaria vesca (you can check out this wikipedia page there’s an interesting range for fruit morphology!).

Fragaria vesca, fruits and flower

–

Read Full Post »

Achiote, roucou, Bixa!

Did you ever heard of Bixaceae before? Some probably do. Bixaceae is a rather small family, with a still difficult taxonomic delineation, being closely related to Cochlospermaceae, maybe part of it, maybe a true group on its own. Systematicists may come up with an answer, or maybe not, whenever new sequences are added, but morphological evidence is not straightforward and the question is still a matter of classification preferences. Anyway, I come up with Bixaceae because of an interesting species of course, actually because of the mascot of this family. This species is Bixa orellana, and is also known as Achiote in the English world, Roucou in the French world (or derived names such as Urucu in Brasilian Portuguese, taken directly from Tupi).

Read Full Post »

Best fruit ever?

Pomegranate (Punica granatum), is a fruit originating from Iran and now cultivated in many countries around the Mediterranean Sea. It used to be cooked as juice though this role is now way past. We can find it sold for consumption as a fruit by now, and indeed, it’s really fresh and amazingly accomodate life at the warmest part of the day. But wait, I didn’t track back to the few papers about domestication yet, that I was already swamped into an incredibly huge amount of litterature dealing with its potential other economical uses as pharmaceutical. You won’t believe it!

Read Full Post »

At the crossroad between biodiversity and health issues

A recurrent argument in favor of protecting nature is of course that new drugs and cures may hide behind biodiversity, so that we may best protect to our best, with the hope we are buying in the right tombola ticket (whenever we can’t save everything). Of course this is of importance (even though we overlooked the simple fact that recreational and cultural values of biodiversity should be enough to convince protecting is still the best we have to do), but translating the effort into the actual benefit is a very long enterprise. There are examples of interests but they are way too scarce.

But today, I’d like to investigate yet another aspect of biodiversity (variation within species instead of the more general “species richness” that we mean when speaking about biological diversity), and how the biodiversity thing can be more directly of importance with regard to health issues than finding the new cure to everything. [picture of olive tree courtesy of Luigi Rosa]

Read Full Post »