Alfred Reed Bishop and Doris William Butler

The picture above is the very tap root of Bishop's Homegrown/Face Of The Earth Seed. My grandparents shortly after moving to Pekin Indiana from Greensburg KY in 1947 where they purchased the farm that is now Bishop's Homegrown. This picture was taken in Pekin in front of the old co-op next to the old railroad depot, neither of which exist today.

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Thursday, January 7, 2010

A Snow Day and Selecting Corn Seed For Free Amino Acid Content

Well, it most certainly snowed today, which equals one thing and one thing only for me: Boredom.


So aside from taking a few pictues I decided to organize the seed collection into something that resembles order, particularly getting the varieties and genepools I grow yearly put into one convinent location and getting those in need of seed increase where they can easily be found. Sounds easier than it actually was, sometimes I forget just how much seed I have on hand and of how many varieties at any given point in time.






I also made some visual selections of corn kernels from The Astronomy Domine Genepool. I'm interested in growing out some individual color lines now that all the genes have had a chance to recombine. Most of the purple seed is the result of incorporating Alan Kapulers various Double red and Martian Purple lines into Astronomy Domine, however, those genes have now been shuffled along with the genes from the other 150 plus varieties that make up the genetic background of Astronomy Domine, I have interest in developing another new purple pigmented line (noticed abundant life is carrying another new Munk bergin purple line too that I'm gonna have to add to this material). As you can see from the pic below I was also working on developing a couple more color pools. Particularly red, which is mostly the result of Millersburg Red, Red Evergreen, and the F1 Ruby Queen material, but also an Orange line. Should prove to be fun and helpful.


3 comments:

Ottawa Gardener said...

I can tell you that my kids would love that marshmallow pink colour that you have. They are young girls, what can I say. Though my youngest is into red now. I'll have to tell her about your corn ;) You'd think that would be boring to the average four year old but then her mom has accidentally indoctrinated her into loving plants so that they keep telling me, I want that seed on our farm. :)

Bishops Homegrown said...

The Pink color is actually a bit of an optical illusion, they aren't nearly that vibrant, though I wish they were. They are pink but much less so than in the picture, I picked those genetics up from Native Seeds SEARCH via white Hopi sweet corn which had a very small (10%) amount of nice pink kernals in the dry down stage, I pulled them out and increased the seed and the intensity of the color for a couple of years and added the genetics to Astronomy Domine. If only they looked half as cool as they do in the pic!

Ottawa Gardener said...

Ah, too bad but still cool colours nonetheless. Maybe we can work on making it more vibrant on our farm once it gets up and going. (hint, hint).

A