PBS Forum

Phyo-sanitary regulations within Europe and N America appear to have been universally tightened and moves made to more stictly enforce them.
That being so, shipping anything outside of your free trade zone, without phyto-sanitary certification, is a considerable risk.

Anything found entering the UK from another country without a cert', will be seized and incinerated.

Quote from: Martin Bohnet on February 22, 2024, 03:28:21 AMMaculatum actually has no spots at all in vast areas of origin

Here in the UK maculatum can be found with all the patterns above. Varying amounts of brown spots (some look black at a distance), usually small, is common, plain leaves are by far the commonest.

Take a look at Wurmbea and Colchicum (Androcymbium) pictures here on PBS or on one of the large SA seed websites - Lifestyle, Seeds and All, or Silverhill. Their flowers vary enormously species, to species.

That said, the leaves look pure Iridaceae. Gladiolus?

It does look very much like maculatum, but italicum is so variable too.

Although maculatum can cover the ground well enough, it seldom makes significant tight clumps of leaves, whereas italicum normally does.

Probably maculatum.

More folly, I just cannot understand how such waste of resources gets financed, for little more than garnishes.
The last section says it all.

One of UK's 'most advanced' vertical farm opens (msn.com)

I'd love to see some costings to understand the "logic". Especially at today's (or last year's) cost of electricity - so high, along with the price of gas, that many growers across Europe left their greenhouses cold and empty winter-spring 2022-2023.

Maybe the lighting is at a low level compared to producing anything but young plants/seedlings, which this sort of "farming" does. Maybe the plants have no time to etiolate?
Maybe the fast growth of seedlings allows fast enough turn-around of the growing space that output is high enough to offset the vast cost of running the growing room?

OK, admission first.......

Do I beleive any of the many and various claims about (house-) plants absorbing anything significant from the air?
No.
But I will work through any claims that people make, unless insanely daft before I even get that far.

The problem with trying to rationalise anything involving something like household conditions, including damp, is that there is never information about how and why things are damp, for how long, or when. There are countless imponderables.
However -
As a very general rule, the dew point inside an "average" UK house, will generally be about 1-2C higher than outdoors. There will be "stagnant pockets" of air that may creap higher (or even stay lower) in RH, but for mould to be a problem, not just a "dark mark" in a small corner of the room, we must be talking the bulk of any room.

Mould requires 70+% RH to really get going. At a room temperature of 20C, the air will contain something around 15g of water per cubic metre at that RH.
So let's say we need to be around 50% RH to be at least reasonably clear of mould, and the room is 20 cubic metres - quite small. So around 20 x 15 x (50/70) = 214g of water will have to be removed.

That assumes no more ingress of moisture.

Think about it.

I grow lots of Sansevieria, all indoors, I don't notice desication of anything.

The driver for bio-tech is money/profit, not the origins of any species. There are only a small handful of crop species that provide the vast majority of human (and livestock) calories world-wide - in no particular order - wheat, rice, maize, potatoes. All the rest, such as manioc, sweet potato, barley, sorghum, plantains, millet, bread fruit and such, are really very small beer on a world scale. 
Apart from calories, probably the next most important crop (some would argue more important than starch sources) would be a major protein sorce - soy - and that originates from? East Asia. 
Without soy, the livestock industry world-wide would be a very, very pale shadow of what it is today.

One of the very first genetically engineered crops that I heard of was rice - so-called golden rice, which produces beta-carotene within the grain.

Research on that started in 1982 with the first field trials in 2004. There is (or was), enormous resistance to growing it, despite the trully, almost incomprehensibly, vast amount of defficiency-induced disease it would help avoid.

I can see both of those traits being welcomed by plenty of anti-GMOers.

I am unsure why/how one newly introduced gene can be better or worse than any other. There is also the option not to use any such seed - no-one is being forced to grow anything.

Quote from: fierycloud on February 11, 2024, 06:25:30 PMSome of the old world species are becoming novel food to the Old world people.

Quotehttps://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/notification/637917

Prodotti contenenti bambù della specie Bambusa vulgaris, novel food/novel food cooked bamboo shoots (Bambusa vulgaris) from Chinanotified 12 OCT 2023 by  Italy | last update 9 NOV 2023

Quotehttps://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/notification/631053
Non-authorized Novel food betel nuts (Areca catechu) from Bangladeshnotified 1 SEP 2023 by  Italy | last update 25 SEP 2023

I am unsure how to read those.
Everyone knows about bamboo shoots, although many may not know betel.
Betel - known as sopari in most shops here in the UK, has been chewed by many Asian people since the dawn of time - it is what stains many peoples' teeth reddish-brown. It is chewed either as is or as part of paan ( pronounced "parn", as in "farm", usually wrapped in a betel leaf, from a different plant entirely). To me it tastes rather soapy, especially as an after-tatste, and not at all enjoyable - if I have paan in an Asian restaurant (as a palate cleanser after a meal), I will always ask for no sopari, which probably strikes most Asian people as very odd as paan is a vehicle specifically for chewing sopari.
You can buy sopari either as whole seeds (they look like large nutmegs), or ready-sliced when it looks a lot like a comic-book version of a section through a brain.

My parents, born over 100 yeras ago now, always mentioned using Areca nut for worming dogs, long before there were wormers available. I have no idea if it worked.

The vast, vast majority of new varieties are still produced by selective breeding. Genetic modification is still generally used only to introduce some trait that isn't anywhere within the gene-pool of the plant (or animal) concerned.

I always take a sanity check when GMOs are mentioned, or two actually -

1. We have been eating maize/corn that is GM'd for years, and...

2. The statement from one or other anti-GMO groups some years ago, if the same change can be produced by conventional selective breeding, it is different/acceptable.............................

I wonder if I am Round-up-ready yet..................................... and if any anti was faced with a xeno-transplant or death, what they'd choose.

Thanks @Uli

The only time that I use a propagator/heat with winter-growing species, is if the seed is said to require temperature swings (such as Lachenalia) and I can't achieve that without.

Late summer into autumn will be OK in the greenhouse, but at this time of year there will be little or no difference day-night, depending on weather - I would use some heat during the day to get 20-25C in the pot (currently we have 8-12C night and day, but as everyone knows UK weather changes an awful lot - at the end of the week we have around freezing all day).

The Androcymbium here are all in the greenhouse now. Minimum around 6C.

Lots of winter-growers - Gladiolus, Albuca, for instance - will germinate well on a window-sill indoors at this time of year, so 15-20C, almost constant.

I have spoken to a well-known grower in mainland Europe and he is of the opinion that very fresh seed is required.
They have sown plenty of seed and only had one germinate.

I will keep the pots here for another year - nothing lost by doing that - but it seems unlikely that they will produce anything.

Where did my post in answer to Carlos go?

There is no right to roam in England (it is different in Scotland). As for Channel Islands and the like.................

The translation to German would be simple enough, the translation from positive to negative and vice versa, more than a little trickier.

In the UK we can get dramatic changes of weather "at the drop of a hat", but very seldom will our Met' Office be far out within 48 hours, less good to a week out. The other advantage is that they produce unadorned stat's, no comments.
This winter, I have been fitting and removing insulation in the greenhouse in response to the forecast,and so far, it has been prefectly adequate enough.

Quote from: Carlos on January 26, 2024, 11:51:07 PMIt does not apply to seeds??? Then I can go to Devon or Cornwall or the Channel islands and collect Prospero seeds??

You still need permission to be there, but you can collect seeds. Just be careful not to disturb the plant.
To be completely legal, you would need a phyto' cert' issued by DEFRA and whatever import requirements Spain stipulates.

I would be very surprised if there were not good numbers of plants in cultivation within the UK. For instance (originally collected in Spain!!) -
Scilla autumnalis – RarePlants

I am sure that you know, but the latin name is used to cover many genetically distinct species which appear all but identical (a so-called cryptic species complex).