January 15, 2016 - 12:57am
Old world grains make a comeback
This from Science News Daily:
The full research paper is here via the abstract (but a subscription is needed for the full text).
Interesting, although the claimed additional health benefits are not what the research was about and might be illusory.
So the ancient wheats were too tall and produced lesser yields? Maybe time for selective breeding of shorter, better quality protein, higher yield varieties? :P
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...it took Longin and his team a couple of years to get enough seeds to plant their research fields."
I wondered about that until I realised that there must be different varieties of all three, just as there are different varieties of modern wheat. That raised the question: where do the older varieties survive but in sufficiently small quantities that they couldn't obtain as much as they needed in one go? Did they just manage to get a few seeds from a seed-bank and then have to plant and re-plant to get enough to sow a field? If so, what other interesting varieties of wheat, ancient and relatively modern, are being safeguarded in seed banks.
I have a friend who grows strange and wonderful varieties of tomato from seed he gets from a seed bank, renewing the vitality of the bank's stock by returning seed from the fruit he grows. How fascinating would it be to do the same with wheat?
Have a look at the Brockwell bake site: http://www.brockwell-bake.org.uk/
There's also the Lammas Faire stuff by John Letts sold via Bakery Bits: http://bakerybits.co.uk/bakery-ingredients/flour/lammas-fayre-flour-mill.html
And a few others too - one project is local to me but I don't have any real contacts for it.
-Gordon
at an understandably premium price, but I was thinking how much fun it would be to pick ancient varieties and grow them yourself. You wouldn't need a great deal of land to produce sufficient to last you for a year.
The Brockwell Bake site's "wheat portal" looks like it would be an ideal place to peruse with that in mind.