Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
MAY 9, 2021
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Jackanory comes from Kew Gardens today!
Potatoes and lettuce will have to be replaced in the UK by small, mustardy root vegetables and dandelion leaves as a warming climate means we cannot rely on traditional crops, Kew Gardens has said.
Horticulturalists and scientists at the gardens are working to see which food plants can be grown to resist increasing pests and diseases, sunnier summers and warmer, wetter winters.
Next week, a new TV show exploring the secrets of the gardens will launch on Channel 5, showing how gardeners and scientists worked together during lockdown.
Helena Dove, who runs the Kitchen Garden at the facility, grows crops selected by scientists to see how they fare in a British garden plot.
She said that potato blight, a disease which can wipe out the whole crop, is becoming more common because of a warmer climate in this country. At some point it may become unviable to grow them, she and other horticulturists and scientists at Kew believe.
“Traditional potatoes are becoming very hard to grow because of blight,” she said.
Two strange-looking, knobbly little roots are being trialed instead, as they fare better in a warm climate and are resistant to blight.
The gardener explained: “We have been trying to grow root vegetables that could be substituted in the future. One we grow is oculus tuberosa, and tropaeolum tuberosum – the former is a little lemony root, it does really well, we are breeding it in the UK to make it more suitable for our climate. We also have a mustardy root crop, and sweet potatoes are doing well as well. They could be a replacement. We won’t know for tens of years but we have to start somewhere.”
Many who tried to grow lettuces during last year’s heatwave will have noticed it was an uphill battle. These hot summers are becoming more common, so Ms Dove is working to find hardier alternatives to the salad crop.
She said: “Lettuces bolt when it gets hot so we may not be able to grow them in hot dry summers. We are growing tropical leaves, orache, tree spinach, they are traditionally grown for their grain but the leaves are edible so they sort of replace spinach. We are also growing dandelion which have really bitter but delicious leaves. They will keep growing through anything. We are trialling all this for salad in the kitchen garden.”
The idea that potatoes need a perfect climate is nonsensical. They are grown in a wide variety of climates around the world, hot and cold, dry and wet:
Harvest can certainly be adversely affected by the weather. Dry summers can stunt growth, but equally wet summers are not good news either, as farmers found to their cost in 2012.
However potato yields in the UK have been stable since 1990, following a period of rapid increase:
And UK summers are neither getting wetter nor drier:
As for lettuces, the dear lady seems to have totally lost the plot. Again, lettuces are grown in many countries with warmer climates than ours, including India and Spain. However, temperatures above 24C are not optimal:
Hotter countries, such as Spain, get around this by growing at cooler times of year, typically November to April.
According to the British Leafy Salads Association, the lettuce season runs from May to October, but planting can commence earlier if it is a warm spring. And the warmer the weather, the faster the leaf growth:
In other words, lettuce production is likely to benefit from a warmer climate, as planting can start earlier and finish later.
As for days over 24C, the summer of 2018 notwithstanding, they are still a rarity in England:
In reality, whether British climate changes or not, the change will be so slow that nobody will even notice, never mind the lettuces!
Why is it that I feel a Bob Newhart moment is waiting in the wings? “You what, Walt?, you put it in the ground, cover it it dung, wait a few weeks, dig it up, then eat it????”
Nice one Alan. Newhart did many only hear one side of the conversation bits.
Thank you for that it was brilliant.
The French for dandelion is pis-en-lit. It’s the sacred flower of bedwetters.
Coincidence …… or not??
thought that was soursobs?
dandelions was something like dan (dente(teeth ) of the lion referencing the sawshaped leaf…
Weather averages for northern potato growing area in Western Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_009178.shtml
No rush to grow “small, mustardy root vegetables”
The reason I live where I do is because my ancestors had to flee Ireland because of cold, wet weather, not because of a warming climate…”In 1845 a strain of Phytophthora arrived accidentally from North America, and that same year Ireland had unusually cool moist weather, in which the blight thrived”.
Perhaps I could claim my ancestors were climate refugees.
These people are nuts , potato’s here where I am are bloody weeds once you plant them they just keep coming and coming you cant get rid of them.
Talking to UK potato farmers it has been wet winters that have been the problem, not warming climates as for that all they need to do is change the variety of potato they grow.
Nutrient density, anyone?
Beans, peas & potatoes are fairly nutrient dense, as plants go (a potato has more Vit C than a tomato. Whoda thunk it?)…All other veggies are used only for color & texture for the meal. Their content of protein, mins & vt is so scant that you’d need 10-20 servings /d to provide RDA of most nutrients (That’s why USDA recommends 9 servings/d).
Combining 6cu corn + 4cu rice + 1.5cu beans will give you 2000cal and 60gm protein (and a belly ache) for your daily needs…. Six oz of beef will give you 500 cal , 60gm protein and more vits & mins than the rice/corn beans.
Lettuce (or dandelion leaves) ?… You may as well eat paper for the nutritional content.
There was a very clever TV advert for beef in NZ where they had a meat carving dish full of spinach or silverbeet and behind that was a piece of steak on a plate, promoting the iron content, but when the steak was brought forward to match the other it was minscule in comparison.
It really showed how deceptive things can be.
Dandelion is an excellent plant related to lettuce. It is a treat for earthworms and is perfect for salads. It also makes a great natural fertilizer.
The sort of dross you get when people eat too many potatoes and too little animal protein.
I lived in the Middle East for 20 years. Our potatoes were either local or imported from Egypt, Lebanon or India. Last time I looked, these places were somewhat hotter than UK.
We now have children for reporters.
Children just aren’t going to know what potatoes are.
I dont eat potatoes, they are fattening.
It’s always only a question of quantity, mostly, it’s what you eat with the potatoes and a fat thick sauce that are fattening.
All these mandated paper are based on nonsense without scientific background.
The only reason they are written is fearmongering and to keep alive “the Cause” and the respective agenda.
Justin Moat (no joke) works in Kew’s Biodiversity Informatics and Spatial Analysis department with the Spatial Analysis and Data Science team – according to their blurb.
Kew went loony with Justin some time ago.
a November 2012 study by Kew Gardens’ researchers revealed that the world’s best coffee strand, Arabica, is likely to disappear by 2080. This is because 99.7% of the growing areas will become unsuitable for the crop
Will coffee disappear from Earth due to global warming & climate change? (coffees.mobi)
The study, which uses computer modelling….
Is our daily cup of coffee under threat? | Kew
Welcome to the grim world of the BioClimate modeller!
I have no problem with jet designers using models because a lot of the variables are known and they eliminate the obvious but the same can’t be said about climate modellers. There are just too many unknown variables. So I think that climate modellers are insane thinking that they have any validity.
Never liked lettuce anyway.
@Charles Rotter,
regards the CET temperatures:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
Last 132 months gliding average minus the previous 132 months gliding average will give you a lag but will also reveal that the gliding 11 year cycle bottomed in 1987, rose 1.1 degrees towards 1999, wiggled sideways until 2008 after which the the gliding average difference has collapsed 1.1 degrees (from a lower top than 1999 to a lower bottom than 1987).
The AMO shows the same thing:
From the anomaly average last 11 year cycle minus previous 11 year cycle bottoming in 1975 at -0.285 increasing to 2006 at 0.283 and falling from there to to -0.00, currently with the normal blip residing at 0.05.
AMO cycle seems to be 67 +/- 1 year and we should bottom out 2043 +/- 2 years. CET cycle seems to be 33 years.
Disregarding the faster reaction on land temperatures than ocean temperatures, they could actually be said to be in sync.
(Average Solar output last 11 years have collapsed to 1905 levels).
All that said, General Winter which got the better of the Germans in 1941-1942, is nowhere to be found in CET data. Hence there must be an overwhelming consensus that the newspapers at the time writing about the terrible cold, were catering to delusionals, climate deniers and ultra-rightwing conspiracy theorists.
Oddgeir
Hmmm…. Regarding potato blight, I’m hearing both cold and wet as well as warm and wet being a big factor, so I’m guessing it isn’t temperature, but rather the dampness as the significant factor. There are plenty of other factors as well, and it looks like the Great Irish Potato Famine was somewhat of a ‘perfect storm’ of factors. Among these include that potatoes need “breathing room”, i.e. don’t plant them too close together. Now imagine that you are a poor Irish potato farmer then, with a limited parcel of land. Naturally, you want to squeeze as much production out of that land as possible, so perhaps you plant closer together than you know you should, because usually, it isn’t a problem. Unless blight is around. Rotate your crops. Oops. Don’t leave any potatoes in the ground, and don’t recycle any plants infected with blight. Oops. And so on.
“Experts”.
Seeing as you can easily grow all types of lettuce, herbs and even onions in window boxes these people are clearly full of shyt. Though that helps grow things, too! Oh, and the idea that potatoes and yams, which mainly came out of South America, don’t like heat is comical. Insects are the main enemy of potatoes, which, sadly, do increase with warmer temps. So, kill the many varieties of insects that harm them and we are good to go.
It is as usual a total load of (rear emissions from a bull)
The photo looks like a healthy woman but she won’t be if she tries to sustain herself with weeds.
Robbing bees of food by eating dandelions is a high crime in Green Land.
Potatoes can’t take the heat? Tell that to all the potato growers in Idaho, which has hot, dry summers!
What about all the lettuce that’s grown in the central valley of California–in the winter?
But if Helena Horton wants to eat dandelion leaves, she can come to my front yard and harvest them for free.
“The idea that potatoes need a perfect climate is nonsensical.”
So, no different than any warmunist ideas.
This looks like research to find the best, cheapest and easiest-to-grow food to feed the masses needed to build massive stone monuments to the gods who saved us from AGW.
lot of people (not me) like Queen Anne’s Lace
Dandelion leaves? Nothing against them (I’ve tried) and they have a unique flavour but nothing I’ve seen out produces kale. Higher in nutrition and grows way better than lettuce in my climate zone (3 but in reality 2.5). Wind, hail, torrential downpours don’t seem to bother it much. It recovers and keeps producing.
I have a recipe for Kale chips which I remember was quite good. Will have to try and find it again.