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, February 18, 2010

Oh my....another fantasticly bio-diverse gift!


I have often talked about my immense admiration and respect for Ken Ettlinger an his Long Island Seed Project and the valuable public domain breeding work they do. I have sourced much germplasm from Ken over the past six years and have developed many new varieties or ongoing selections from his material. I have worked closely with his C. Pepo winter Mixes and Hubbard mixes particularly looking for disease tolerance and pest tolerance with a lot of success and in the future will release many lines from this diverse material.

Recently I sent Ken a packaged of some nearly finished Hip-Gnosis Seed Development projects and an order for some more germplasm to finish/shure up some of the ongoing breeding pools, today I got that package in the mail, and boy what a beauty it was!

Watermelons in many categories, yellow, red, orange fleshed, high brix, icebox, mixes and more. Several secletions of turnips (which I plan to use with my current turnip grex), a mix of 12 spinach varieties, hubbard selections is every color and size, Acorn/Carnival squash in individual color lines (I've had the mix for a long time, selecting for color/tolernaces but loosing a bit of color and shape/size diversity, same with the hubbard mix), White Cucumbers, cos/romaine lettuces, Asian Lettuces, and many others!

I thank all of those who have inspired me and helped me out with my quite unscientific minded experiments over the past few years particularly to Ken Ettlinger, Tim Peters, Alan Kapuler, Tom Wagner, J. Spero, Caroll Deppe and all the others, Thank you so much!

1 comment:

Ottawa Gardener said...

That looks far more beautiful than candy to this kid. Wonderful.