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Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

bbc.com

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Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#71

Post by PaulRobinson »

The UK straddles the 55th parallel North. Due to the jet streams (and formerly, trade winds) carrying warm air from the Caribbean, it has often benefitted from a milder climate than other regions at similar latitudes: Alaska, Siberia, the Baltic states.

But this is wild. I am only in my 40s but I've seen the climate change significantly and it having a major impact on flora and fauna.

When I was a kid, English wine was a joke and now it's winning prizes because we have the same climate French vineyards did when I was a child. The idea of growing olives in the UK was laughable, but now in the South East of England it's starting to look commercially viable. Only 10 years ago I remember days with highs over 30C being rare, but we just had two weeks of them, accompanied by tropical nights (not dropping below 20C), for the first time I remember.

And now... bananas. Which is, pun intended, utterly bananas.

It feels too late to stop the worst of the damage, but the idea of this accelerating and getting worse is just astonishing to me, that within my lifetime I'd witness such a huge swing in climatology.

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#72

Post by anukin »

forinti wrote: post #50

In South America there's a very aggressive spider that lives on the bananas (genus Phoneutria). Spiders usually shy away from humans but these attack and have a very nasty venom. I wonder if the heat will take nasty critters to Europe.

We grow bananas at our farm in India and we have never seen this spider ever.

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#73

Post by pocksuppet »

Planktonne wrote: post #13

> ...while we say goodbye to some old favourites. An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.

Potential? The Holocene Extinction is already the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, and that's pre-climate-change.

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#74

Post by culi »

rdedev wrote: post #43
danans wrote: post #19

Seems like an opportunity to plug the latest video by my favorite YouTube long form documentary maker, OTR: The History of the Banana https://youtu.be/YVVD1cYelUE?is=ADLXFR_-mIMdDfom Here gets into ancient innovations that allowed bananas to be grown outside of their native habitat in Papua New Guinea. If you haven't seen his content, and you get sucked in, then settle in without distractions - this is the opposite e…

My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe

Potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins/zucchinis/most squashes, cassava, the common bean (including pinto, black, kidney, etc), cassava, sunflowers, avocado, etc all didn't exist in European kitchens until the 1500s (and not really widespread until at least the 1600s).

Also, most of these crops were specifically domesticated in the Andes. If you go to the Andes today you can still find traditional potato farmers who take care of hundreds of varieties of potatoes of all different shapes and colors. Some are ornamental, some are edible raw, some are only used in soup, some are even used medicinally

Maybe surprising is that there are no native species of banana to "the New World" despite there being about 100 species and thousands of named cultivars.

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#75

Post by ebbi »

Slightly off-topic:

When I used to eat banana-flavored things (milkshakes, chocolate bars, etc), I always thought that the flavor was artifically inflated and tasted nothing like an actual banana...

...until I went to Fiji. Externally, the appearance of the banana would probably render it as waste in Western countries as it doesn't look nice and yellow - and looks close to what an overripe/rotten banana looks like, but gosh they tasted amazing!

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#76

Post by card_zero »

notahacker wrote: post #70
mike_hearn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not arguing in good faith, so I'll just leave it with this: > and not the more standard explanation for minute-to-minute temperature rises of the sun coming out It was a cloudless day.

I mean, it's better faith in the original argument which was a bunch of ludicrous FUD blaming measurement error for climate change, as if thermometers hadn't been located near heat islands and airports for decades and crank blogs had a better idea how to deal with measurement error than meteorologists. The irony is I could actually make a better argument for immigration being a factor in climate change (moving to a m…

I'd be happier if you'd thrown in some concession like "I admit data is sometimes bad quality". That wouldn't mean agreeing with your opponent's implicit denial that any warming is happening. Your side doesn't have to be perfect in order to be in the right, and if you claim infallibility it looks less credible, to me. Is it more important to laugh at this guy, than to be scrupulous?

It may spoil an entertaining deliberate confusion, but you know the airports with the jets, and the cities full of immigrants, were clearly stated as separate from the start: "two sources of corruption ... the first ... the second".

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#77

Post by culi »

pfdietz wrote: post #60
rdedev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is the history of chili pepper. It's something so fundamental to indian cuisine that I assumed chillies were native to India for a long time. His video shows the true history of how that spice travelled from the Americas to all over the globe

Have you read Charles C. Mann's book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created"? It's all about the global impact of the opening of the New World by the Europeans, and how the global exchange created and is creating the "homogenocene", the age of homogeneity. There's a part about a folk song in the Philippines that lovingly goes over the crops being grown around a village. They're all introduced.

It really transformed Europe too. Europe's basically a story of famine after famine until they got access to the potato. I don't know if any other technology has saved as many European lives as the potato

Pacific island cultures are a bit unique in their relationship to the New World though. Chickens which come from SE Asian jungles have been in South America since at least 1300 AD. And sweet potatoes were grown in Polynesia around 1000 AD.

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#78

Post by culi »

comrade1234 wrote: post #48

I have a paw paw tree that has survived 7 years in northern Wisconsin. Unfortunately it is the only one out of five that I planted that has survived and so I'll never get fruit because they reproduce sexually and as far as I know the closest one is 4 hours south in Madison.

Pawpaws are actually hermaphroditic not dioecious. Your tree produces female flowers first and later in the year produces male flowers. This is to prevent self-pollination. However, you can save some male pollen until next year.

Alternatively, you could graft the branch of a pawpaw that flowers earlier to try and get the male and female flowers maturing at the same time. You might also be able to just buy some pollen. It's actually quite easy to collect. You can use a brush to sprinkle it on a female flower

Re: Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

#79

Post by Planktonne »

pocksuppet wrote: post #73
Planktonne wrote: post #13

> ...while we say goodbye to some old favourites. An incredibly dystopian way to minimise human-caused climate change and potential extinction for yet more species.

Potential? The Holocene Extinction is already the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history, and that's pre-climate-change.

I know, but currently we still have rhubarb. The article is extremely blasé about even more species losing their environment.
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