Saturday 12th October 2013 at 1:30pm
Venue: St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Katikati.
Cnr of Main Road and Mulgan Street, Katikati
(This is the church right next door to the A&P Showgrounds where we held our Tree Sale, and Katikati enjoys Friday farmers’ markets)
Mark will speak on his work to compare the absorption into the body of the two different forms of lycopene and will be bringing heritage tomato seeds and maybe some bean seeds for us to try growing in our area. See the latest TreeCropper p38 for an article by Mark on this topic and background science on tomato carotenoids p40.
As usual we will follow with afternoon tea and as we have invited members of the Waikato and Franklin Branches to join us, some extra offers of help with plates would be appreciated – clipboard at intervening field day or ring Elizabeth please.
For the information of new members Mark Christensen is the man who brought us the Monty’s Surprise apple and co-ordinated the research on the active compounds in Heritage apples grown in New Zealand. Mark won the Dr Don McKenzie Award in 2006 for this work.
He is now looking into the absorption into the body of the two different forms of lycopene under the auspices of ‘The Central Tree Crops Research Trust‘.
The committee have voted to contribute to this research, which will be carried out by Plant and Food Research.
It all sounds very interesting and exciting so mark this day on your calendar.
Responses
Heard through the grapevine – a comment which just missed next-newsletter ‘deadline’-
The ever-publishing internet (imposes at worst maybe ‘dead phone-line’) was contacted;
here is that comment (slightly abridged):
[some attendees] would like to congratulate Elizabeth and the committee for organizing Mark’s thoroughly enjoyable and informative visit.While Mark was not promoting “trees” but mainly just crops, New Zealand badly needs more research into the values of the crops from our trees.
Good on Mark for the selfless manner, creating better health, that we all can benefit from.
So we would wish more of this great stuff, thankyou Elizabeth and Co.John, Heather and Donald.
The web management team was also able to attend, and fully endorse the above sentiments appreciating a quality presentation sharing some diligent research work.