[EBOOK] Onions and Other Vegetable Alliums (2nd Edition), James L. Brewster, Published by CABI

A number of people, including lecturers, researchers and seed company staff, have told me that they found the first edition of this book useful. This is the best reward for writing such a book. A lot of new allium science has been published since the first edition and progress has been rapid, particularly in the fields of genetics, plant breeding and plant pathology, where the techniques of molecular biology have had great impact. So, an attempt at an update was clearly worthwhile. Shortly before writing the first edition I had co-edited the multi-author Onions and Allied Crops with Haim Rabinowitch. so up to date reviews by experts in the relevant science were to hand and familiar to me. For this edition, I have had to resort more to the original research literature, although the reviews by contributors to Rabinowitch and Currah's (2002) Allium Crop Science: Recent Advances were key sources for many topics. A book of this breadth cannot attempt to be an exhaustive review of the research literature and. inevitably, in choosing what research to mention, there is some bias to what I am familiar with, notably towards work from Wellesbourne. from the UK and what is published in English. 1 apologize to those who have done interesting work which is not mentioned but, nevertheless. I hope the book gives a reasonable overview of the current scientific understanding about the vegetable alliums. I hope this second edition will help to raise and maintain awareness of the huge and continuing achievement of allium scientists in discovering so much fascinating and useful information about these crops. These researchers are the real heroes and heroines behind this book. I hope I have not misrepresented their work by error, omission or misplaced emphasis.

The aim of the book is to introduce the scientific principles that underlie production practices, rather than to give detailed instruction on how to produce allium crops. If the crop technologist has an understanding of the basic principles fundamental to his craft he/she should be better able to adapt his/her methods to changing circumstances and opportunities, and better be able to understand and cope with any abnormal or unusual problems that he/she encounters. Understanding of principles should also improve his/her judgement in deciding between possible alternative techniques. Furthermore, the details of production methods change as new products, legislation or market conditions arise, whereas the underlying principles remain true and relevant, although of course our knowledge of principles improves and increases as science progresses.

It may seem over-ambitious to cover the wide range of science closely relevant to allium production, but one advantage of such an undertaking is that it reveals connections between different aspects of the underlying science and, sometimes, conflicts in the recommendations for practice coming from them. Furthermore, the crop grower has to embody the integral of all the underlying science in his/her production methods. The book is obviously aimed at students and professionals with a special interest in the allium vegetables, but 1 hope it might interest the occasional, more general, reader. On my first day as an undergraduate agricultural student at Wye College, UK, I remember the then Principal, Dunstan Skilbeck, remarking in his introductory talk to new students, that the studies they were about to embark on were not only a source of practically applicable information but also offered a 'window' into many fields of knowledge; a possibility particularly well provided for by broadly based courses like agriculture or horticulture. In a more limited way. I hope that this book may serve not just as a source of some rather specialist information on the production of alliums, but can chart a path through many of the disciplines of plant science and show how they connect and interrelate when it comes to application in crop technology. This aspiration might not quite be on a par with William Blake seeing 'a world in a grain of sand', but 1 hope readers will appreciate that one can see a lot of plant science in an onion.

Crop production has its roots in a pre-scientific era when custom and practice must have evolved recipes' for successfully growing crops. Slowly this practical knowledge has become explained, improved and elaborated by connection with the systematically organized and logically connected body of scientific knowledge. There are successive phases in this scientific systematization. First there is observation, description and listing of phenomena. Then there is an attempt to make generalizations and a search for principles that unify a wide number of observations. This usually involves making connections with information from outside the confines of the particular phenomena being studied. If successful, some general principles emerge which can be used to make predictions beyond the original observations. This is when theory becomes not just interesting, but useful, and can begin to feed new methods into production technology. With further advancement and precision of knowledge it becomes possible to explain observations not just in terms of some qualitative general principles, but in numerical terms, i.e. to give quantities to predictions from theory which match subsequent measurements. Such matching of quantitative prediction with observed measurement has been the cornerstone of physical science since Newton’s time but, since the late 1940s. aspects of crop science have become quantitative. Hence. I have included a fair number of models and equations in the text describing various aspects of crop physiology in particular. I hope some readers will not be dissuaded by these, they simply summarize succinctly a lot about the physiological responses concerned. However, the accompanying graphs and verbal descriptions give the gist of what is relevant, so detailed study of the equations is not essential. Such equations are, however, the basis of the computer-based models that are being used increasingly to integrate scientific information so it can be applied in crop management - for example, to forecast irrigation or fertilizer requirements, or to predict disease and pest outbreaks and. therefore, when to apply preventive pesticides. The other major trend of recent years is the increasing application of molecular methods to allium science, particularly to taxonomy, genetics and pathology. These techniques are revolutionizing crop breeding and increasing the rapidity and precision of pathogen identification, and therefore leading to improved diagnosis of crop disease and understanding of disease epidemiology. In a few places 1 have included a sentence or two in explanation of the background science to give some orientation to readers not already familiar with a topic, mainly to try briefly to explain the purpose and implications of the work being discussed. I hope more expert readers will forgive this occasional dip into what may already be well known to them.

Acknowledgement to those who have helped me produce this book starts with my late father. Leonard K. Brewster, who first got me scratching the soil and sowing seed on the family vegetable plot when I was about 4 years old. Furthermore, he always encouraged enquiry, discussion, debate and clear use of English. I was fortunate enough to take a crop science degree at London University's, notv sadly defunct, Wye College. Here, amid the glorious east Kent countryside. I first encountered the excitement of academic enquiry fostered by the wide range of subjects taught in a university agriculture faculty. Discussions with like-minded fellow students kindled interests that have remained with me ever since. Later, from Bernard Tinker, Peter Nye and other mentors in the former Soil Science Laboratory at Oxford. I had the good fortune to be shown how quantitative thinking from the physical sciences was becoming increasingly relevant to the progress of crop science. I thank the former director of Wellesbourne. Professor John Bleasdale. for the opportunity to take up a post to investigate 'what makes onions tick' in an era when funding was available for fairly broadly defined and long-term research in crop physiology. I am grateful to UK taxpayers for funding this work. Working at Wellesbourne, I became acquainted with the research of colleagues in virtually all the scientific disciplines immediately relevant to field vegetable production. Discussions with, and presentations given by. these colleagues inform this book and I hope I have done justice to those aspects of their work reported on here. Among former Wellesbourne colleagues I owe particular gratitude to Dr Lesley Currah, who has drawn my attention to countless reports on aspects of allium research over the years, the late Mr Harold Roberts for his profound insights on weed science and onion agronomy, and to Professor Duncan Greenwood, whose stimulating discussions on virtually all matters scientific - but in particular about soil-plant relations - have been an inspiration over many years. I thank Warwick University and the current director of Wellesbourne. Professor Simon Bright, for access to the excellent library there, without which I could not have prepared this book, and the library staff there, past and present, for their hospitality and help.

The International Society of Horticultural Science edible allium conferences initiated in Argentina in 1994 by Dr Claudio Galmarini have given me regular updating on the frontiers of research in the subject worldwide. The information so gained, and also by e-mail at other times from allium scientists internationally, has helped me greatly in the preparation of this book. The agricultural science abstracts database of CABI. accessed via Warwickshire College, has been an invaluable resource for systematically reviewing the scientific literature on the allium crops. Thanks are due to my publishers at CABI, formerly Tim Hardwick and latterly Sarah Hulbert, for their patience and cheerful encouragement in the later stages of this work. I thank the editors of this series. Dr Alun Rees and Professor Jeff Atherton, for the invitation to write a second edition and for reading and commenting on draft chapters. I thank Warwick HRI, Wellesbourne and the allied vegetable breeding and seed production companies Bejo Zaden B.v. and de Groot en Slot B.v of Warmenhuizen and Broek op Langedijk. respectively, The Netherlands, for kindly providing the photographs of pest and disease damage in the colour plates. I thank my friend John Pendleton of Design Principles, Kineton, Warwickshire, UK for donating his time and expertise gratis to produce the botanical illustration of vegetable alliums in Plate 1. I am grateful to have learned Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation Sidhi technique so as to be able to take a systematic break from focused mental work to relax and refresh the mind twice a day on a routine basis. Finally. I thank my wife Marnie for inspiring me to undertake a second edition, for her continuous support and encouragement, and for tolerating nearly 4 years of relative neglect of house and garden while I researched and wrote it.

[EBOOK] Onions and Other Vegetable Alliums (2nd Edition), James L. Brewster, Published by CABI

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