botanical-photography:

Welcome To Tanzania: The Rolling Coconut Tree At Chole Island [1200x1600]

Source: http://i.imgur.com/EFsdg.jpg

wapiti3:

Come with Me

Ellie Davies photographer 

biodiverseed:

Schronce’s Deep Black Peanut

This peanut has been selected since 1980 by North Carolina gardener, Gordon Schronce. He started with 3 peanut shells and a total of seven individual peanuts. Unlike regular peanuts with red skins, these had dark purple, almost black skins. Schronce’s Deep Black is a product of his efforts over the years to select the largest seeds with the darkest skin color. Schronce’s is probably related to a heirloom peanut called Carolina Black.  Schronce’s has a darker skin than Carolina Black and more peanuts per shell (3-4).

-Sherck Seeds

#legumes #root vegetables #plant breeding #seed sellers

(via brilliantbotany)

farmlandia:

solarpunks:

$300 Underground Greenhouse Grows Food Year Round; An Extraordinary Walipini 

From vertical farms to solar-powered “farms from a box,” we’ve seen how farming technology has grown leaps and bounds in recent years. But for those who prefer something a little more rustic, growing food from a hole in the ground is as low-tech as you can get.

A walipini, meaning “place of warmth” from the Amaraya Indian language, is an underground greenhouse with a transparent (usually plastic) covering that stays warm by passively soaking up the sun’s heat and absorbing the earth’s thermal energy.

This underground greenhouse collects the sun’s rays and earth’s heat to grow food Photo credit: schweibenalp.ch

Fruits and vegetables can be grown year-round, making it ideal for communities in colder locations that can’t usually grow their own fresh and local produce during certain parts of the year.

The farming method isn’t exactly new. Walipinis have been used in South and Central America for decades, including one that can grow bananas at 14,000 feet in the Andes.

The technique was notably adopted by The Benson Institute, a worldwide food security program of the Mormon church. According to The Plaid Zebra, the Benson Institute and its team of volunteers built a community-sized 74-feet-by-20-feet walipini in La Paz, Bolivia for around a mere $300.

Read more here: $300 Underground Greenhouse Grows Food Year Round; An Extraordinary Walipini 

Just like @paintedgoat. I want to make one.

theonion:

Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs

wapiti3:

Hoya (indian rope)

(via indefenseofplants)

biodiverseed:

water-when-dry posted this article, and it was a very good read. It reminded me of The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation by Fred Pearce.

I put the obligatory “invasive species” warning on seed listings, and even occasionally profile the worst offenders, but as a concept, I think ‘invasive species’ is totally misguided, and mostly economically-motivated. The article digs deep into how the narrative of conservation has shifted from being against corporate environmental destruction, to an anti-invasive species rhetoric guided by corporations.

The only constants in nature are movement and change. Competition from new forms of life is part of what drives evolution.

I think sometimes we have a self-effacing narrative of ‘human hubris’ (which comes from human exceptionalism, where we don’t truly see ourselves as animals living in an ecosystem) that works it’s way into conservation discourse: a plant that arrives ‘naturally’ (ie. by any other means than being transported by humans) is fine, but anything we touch is ‘sinful’ in some way. We’re still assuming there is a nature/culture divide.

The truth is that a biome may be disrupted, and some species may go extinct when they can’t hack it (like North American marsupials did!), but life goes on and has for billions of years. If we step back and look at the changes on a geological time scale, the introduction of Zebra mussels – for example – is just a drop in the bucket of the shifting landscape around the Great Lakes. The reality is, a lot of these ‘invasive’ organisms have adapted to perform ecological services.

I’m not saying “import away” or “don’t do native species conservation,” but I am saying, “life will change and adapt whether we influence it directly or not, so we may as well cut ourselves some slack.”

Read the article here

(via biodiverseed)

botanical-photography:

African Tulip Tree - Spathodea campanulata

Source: https://imgur.com/XF0rNUs

(via indefenseofplants)

(via compulsivefarmer)