E mails required ! Himalayan Balsam in BBC R4

[Erichalfbee]

Perhaps we need to train an army of bunnies to eat it

C B

Perhaps we should farm it?
From The Indy

And, if all else fails, we could always eat it. All parts of the plant are edible, and the seed pods, according to Richard Mabey’s authoritative Flora Britannica, have “a pleasant nutty taste”.

 

[Somerford]

It could be the next superfood ha ha

 

[Luminos]

Perhaps we should farm it?
From The Indy

And, if all else fails, we could always eat it. All parts of the plant are edible, and the seed pods, according to Richard Mabey’s authoritative Flora Britannica, have “a pleasant nutty taste”.

A bit like the forum, then - has a distinctly nutty flavour at times...

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

and then when the foxes get to many and start eating the rest of the wildlife..............

................abolish that ridiculous piece of predjudice and spite - the hunting act woohoo!

 

[Skyhook]

No....I meant, is it .....the infection....akin to another scourge of the garden Impatiens,rather than the Himalayan, Downy Mildew?

No, it's a rust fungus.

.

 

[Skyhook]

There's a point of view that says science interferes too much in nature ... using sledgehammers to crack walnuts. If you look at the resistance we, as humans, are building up to some antibiotics and what happened when pyrethroids were used excessively for varroa treatment you begin to realise that the panacea presented by science may not be best solution.

I think Queens has a point ... perhaps if we gave natural selection and evolution more of a chance and used a little less of the chemical cures then we would store up less problems in the future.

Don't get me wrong ... I'm not totally averse to science but. occasionally, I just wonder whether we are sometimes a bit quick to go for the treatment when a little time and nature may provide a more sustainable cure ?

For a comparison, you could look at what happened when people got bacterial infections before antibiotics- often they died. There were times in our past when infant mortality was over 50%, and many diseases that used to be fatal are now minor.

We do give natural selection and evolution a chance- unfortunately bacteria evolve much faster than us, given that they may have several thousand generations to our one, and can directly exchange genetic information.

Homo sapiens has been around for about 150,000 years. How much longer do you think we should leave it to decide if we're going to develop natural immunity to bacteria?


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[domino]

It is an invasive species - kill it.