Things have been picking up again here on our little farm in Pekin Indiana known as Bishop's Homegrown, we've been keeping ourselves busy with a bit of barn restoration as well as some tractor restoration, trying to bring our old Ford Golden Jubilee back into a usable state, we have decided once we get the money that we are going to do a complete restoration on this family heirloom (three generations, one tractor, one farm) as well we are restoring an old cub caddette lawn tractor for use with some old wheel horse and David Bradley implements, mostly for use in doing raised bed cultivation. Were also preparing to get our new greenhouse up and running and looking at buying a couple of good sized cold frames so that we can more efficiently run our business 12 months a year.
As always plant breeding and research papers are at the top of the agenda, we are already making our list of crosses and segregates for next year and we've got some really exciting things on the way, not the least of which is possibly the most genetically diverse sweet corn ever bred, so far we have bred 24 specific inbred heirloom/Open Pollinated and modern SE Hybrids into our Astronomy Domine breeding material and we will have more than enough to market next year....so say goodbye to bi-color, boring sweet corn and hello to multi-color, large eared, old timey Astronomy Domine!
Our plant breeding endeavours turned out rather nicely this year and we have distributed a number of seeds all over the world on our message board at http://alanbishop.proboards60.com/ as well as through http://www.tomatoland.net/ and with he help of http://www.wintersown.org/ a trend which we hope to watch grow over the next few years as home gardeners and market farmers become more open minded and become more interested in doing natural selection from our F1-F4 genetic material.
Currently we have some very nice tomatoes coming on in our greenhouse and not the rubbery, hydroponic supermarket kind, our tomato have been getting a lot of good reviews locally and we are proud to say that the new lost river market and deli in Paoli Indiana http://www.lostrivercoop.com/ as well as our local grocer's are now carrying our premium "Eco-Logically" grown produce! We also have a great selection of leaf lettuce, turnips, raddishes, kale, mustard, and mesclun available which we have been selling on farm and at the co-op as well. Be sure to check out the co-op if you live locally, they have a really nice selection of local and naturally grow/Eco-logically grown produce, meats, dairy and hygiene products.
Keep your eye peeled the next few weeks for our new 2007 research papers and new updates on the farm!
Check out the article in the Salem Leader about the new co-op (provided you live locally).
-Alan
1 comment:
Hi Alan! I found a blog where someone is delighted with the seeds I sent, including a mention of 'Robert Johnson'.
http://notsocrafty.com/?p=229
Stay warm--it's freezing cold here tonight!
Trudi
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