Ecuador Living

Its one of those moments when you do a literal ‘double take’ … “A what? … a seed fair?”. Ok, time to investigate. One sunday morning in July many indigenous have walked ino town and laid out a huge variety of seeds on the ground ready to sell to others who’re looking to expand their base of crops.

there’s a lot of banter and negotiating taking place

and there was a national organisation present called INIAP (the Autonomous national Institue of Agricultural Investigations) who have cross bred some spieces of corn and potatoes, pricipally to make them more pest resistant. And of course to go for incresed yields. This seems a little strange in the case of potatoes which have been eaten in the Andes (Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru) since 8,000BC and cultivated since 4000BC – and seem therefore to somehow have survived pestilence of all kinds for quite a considerable time.

Here’s a selection of the native spieces of potatoes below

below is a potato developed especially for French fries ——– wow!!!!