Growing rice in Indiana?

Yeah, I know I'm crazy, or at least a little goofy. But seriously, I have been giving this some though lately and I'm darn sure going to try it anyhow!

I recently was given several accessions of rice, including many of glutinous rice and have been thinking of the many ways that I could grow this generally wet loving crop in our climate, a few ideas have come to mind, most would be fairly practical but would not allow the space for any real "harvest" of anything other than seed for replanting, however each experiment could be scaled up and the trick for us would be to grow enough so that we can have a couple of bowls of rice per week here in our home from our own stock.

Most of my ideas revolve around filling a container without any drainage holes such as a bucket, a two gallon bottle with the top cut off, or even a childrens' swimming pull 3/4 full of growing medium, likely garden soil, composted manure, and vermicompost, then filling the container with water and inundating the soil until the water is about 3/4" above the soil line (for this we will use water catchment off of the guttering on the house), at this point you could plant your seed. Once the seed germinates and begins to grow and gets it's head above water you would add water once more, give the seed heads time to develop, stop watering and then harvest. The seed heads could be dried in the greenhouses, later the seed would be threshed from the stalk and then baked at low heat (under 200 degrees farenheight) for under an hour, at which point you should be able to roll the seeds in your hand or place them between some moving screens to create the friction needed to free the seeds. Afterwords you would simply winnow out the chaff and have the essential rice grain for personal use for the coming years!

Now, I'm not sure how large I'm going to make this project this year, but I've got enough freaking containers around here I should be able to get a decent sized experimental plot planted for the year. I'll report back later!

Future Interviews

I hope everyone greatly enjoyed our interview with Peace Seeds Alan Kapuler. Personally I thought it was a terrific interview and we have most certainly built a bridge between our work and Dr. Kapuler's important work. So much lies at our feet in the future in terms of organic and traditional farming, gardening, and plant breeding. More importantly I am now building more bridges and planning a series of interviews which will be of interest to independent and back yard plant breeders, gardeners, and farmers. Next up is Tim Peters of Peters Seed Research who has worked for decades on some amazing perinnial grain projects which we will soon have access to via the Homegrown Goodness Message Board. Tom Wagner, Ken Ettlinger, and Ken Allen also grace the list of upcoming interviews! I hope you are all as excited about this as I am!

Sourcepoint Seeds and Ampetu Oihankesi

Last year I purchased some seed from an interesting organization called Sourcepoint Seeds that I was not able to locate online. Of particular interest to me were Quinoa, Amaranth, and Wheat. "Life Support Crops as owner Ampetu Oihankesi calls them. Today I decided to give Ampetu a call on the phone, our conversation was engaging, deep, and very philosophical. It was a meeting of two similar minds with similar interests. We discussed GMO's, the current human condition, cereal crops, macrobiotics, oriental medicine and a lot more. I was sure to tell him about the Homegrown Goodness message board and I hope he gets a chance to stop by there, I have also added him to the tentative list of folks I would like to interview in the future for this blog as well as for the message board. Ampetu is working with some very interesting and important crops and I hope to purchase seeds from him in the near future for next year and to work with him more closely in the coming years.

For a SourcePoint Seeds Catalog send $4 to

Ampetu Oihankesi
1220 2640 Road
Hotchkiss, Colorado 81419

In the meantime, be sure to check out these audio interviews with Ampetu at Lighting The Fires Of Liberty archive and find the shows from February 5, March 18'th, and April 21'st 2008.

Wow! Indiana to return to Gold Standard, someone in my state government has a brain!!??

From: Daily Paul.com


If this turns out to be true (which from the looks of it it is) and you live in the state of Indiana it is your responsibility to stand up for this return to constitutional currency and don't let this fade from the spotlight or let the Federal Reserve prevent this from happening. It is our full right as a state to treat our state economy as we see fit and no one can tell us otherwise.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 14, 2009

Indiana State Senator Files Gold Money Bill Senate Bill 453, The Indiana Honest Money Act Indiana Picks Up Where New Hampshire Left Off !

Indianapolis, Indiana -- State Senator Greg Walker of District 41, (R-Columbus), has officially filed a Bill that would allow Indiana to offer its citizens a choice of Gold (and Silver) coin or the Electronic equivalent in payable and receivable transactions with the state. This bold bill will finally bring Indiana back into conformance with the Constitution for the United States of America which states "No state shall...make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts..." Article 1, Section 10.

The Indiana Honest Money Act will be voluntary for citizens, but mandatory for certain, specialized businesses and will allow Indiana to fund the Treasury with enough assets insuring that no current state funds will need to be earmarked. S.B. 453 is NOT a replacement for Federal Reserve Notes, but more of a competing, Constitutional currency and an insurance policy for our current, tenuous "money" system.

Indiana is picking up where New Hampshire left off in their attempt to get essentially the same Bill passed back in 2003 and 2005. The Bill was written by eminently qualified Constitutional Money Scholar and practicing Constitutional Lawyer, Dr. Edwin Vieira of Virginia. Jerry Titus of Kokomo, a Senior Field Service Engineer, worked to take New Hampshire's Constitutionally compliant wording of Dr. Vieira's Bill, and adapted it for Indiana's unique purposes.

This exciting juncture is only the beginning of S.B. 453 as it needs to be approved by the Tax and Fiscal Committee for House consideration, etc., and will probably be subject to debate and possible amendments. There will be about 700 Bills under consideration in the current Legislature and only about 200 will survive to be voted on.

Here is the official wording for S.B. 453:

http://www.in.gov/apps/ls...

For more information you may contact: Dana Carter, Legislative Assistant to Sen. Walker at 317-232-9984 or 800-382-9467 Or, visit the Indiana Honest Money website at

http://www.indianahonestmoney.com

For more background information you may contact Harvey Wharfield at 978-635-9586 who has been involved with the concept of a Gold Money Bill for the past five years and has worked with both New Hampshire, Indiana, and other states, in raising the conscientiousness of "sound money" around the country.

Special thanks to all who worked so hard to get S.B. 453 to this auspicious point.

Contact: Harvey Wharfield

Post Oak Public Relations 978 - 635 - 9586, 11am to 11pm, EST
postoak.pr@gmail.com


>Indiana Honest Money Act introduced!! SB 453.

Organic Seed and Public Domain Plant Breeding:

'shroom was kind enough to send this to me to post here for your enjoyment and as research for the upcoming interview, please keep the questions coming, do your research and come up with some great questions, this will be very interesting my friends! Be sure to check out the two Kinship garden layouts in the previous post as well.

Here is the article:

Organic Seed and Public Domain Plant Breeding:

By Alan M. Kapuler Ph.D.
Peace Seeds
10-24-2006

Biopiracy is big business. So is owning and controlling the foodsystem. Tied to the land, water, and resources, our prevalent agriculture is suffering from monocultures, petrochemical inputs, the tyranny of machines, insufficiency of human labor and the hegemony of the wall street banking system.

So control of the seeds, particularly the control of availability, variety and diversity of crop plant seeds which in turn reflects the directions of collecting, breeding and selection by governments, corporations, universities, plant breeders, seed companies and backyard gardeners determine what is available to us as consumers, cooks, gardeners, farmers, eaters, ecologists; people all.

It is with some of these things in mind that in the 1970’s and 1980’s we began collecting seeds and breeding new varieties for the organic movement and the public domain.

Mendel began breeding peas more than a century and a half ago. His legacy endures. We found a copy of his paper on peas in which he shows how to unfold the flower, distinguishing pollen from stigma, and learned how to transfer pollen from one flower to another.

In the 1980’s, we made a public domain vine snap pea (Sugaree) because all the available ones were plant variety patent protected (PVPed). The company controlling these peas wasn’t interested in organics. Yet organically grown snap peas were important plants in our diets and our cuisine. So we used classical plant breeding to liberate some garden peas. This work continues. We developed a yellow podded vine snap pea with unusually sweet leaves (Opal Creek) and in collaboration with Carl Jones a vine snow pea with delicious 8-9” pods (Green Beauty). Recently we used the parsley bush pea which has leafy fronds rather than tendrils to develop hypertendril peas, ones with large, many fingered tendrils that have snow, snap and shell characters in different lines. This year, in collaboration with Phil Gouy, we identified several traits likely to increase the productivity of bush and vine peas by 2-3 fold and began crossing them into our favorite cultivars.

From this we reckoned that organically grown, organically adapted and organically selected cultivars held by the public would be vital for the organic movement and for humanity in general. In addition, these cultivated varieties would have to reflect as many aspects of the local gardening food system as possible; namely, temperate zone crops adapted to the coast, the valleys and the mountains. We needed to explore and develop new, superior and original varieties to promote, enhance and distinguish organic, biological agriculture. Recognizing that F1 hybrids and GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) were further aspects of the privatization of the genome pool, our organic varieties would be open pollinated, free from imposed transgenes and selected under organic conditions.

To us, the organic evolution has moved from 60 Centuries of Chinese Agriculture, from the Indore System of Composting, from Steinerian Biodynamics to the era of the Molecular Biology of Organisms. In particular, microbes that make up an essential part of organic soil cooperate to form biosomes, groups of interacting creatures that promote, enhance and sustain plant growth and health. Bacteria and archaea integrally connect to mycorhizal fungi and viruses in the soil network that biologists call the rhizosphere, the root zone of plants.

A recent microbiological discovery: for decades farmers have been using reduced nitrogen fertilizers like urea and ammonium sulfate to enhance the growth of the plants they grow. Yet plants don’t utilize reduced ammonia very well, they prefer and concentrate nitrate, oxidized nitrogen in their cell vacuoles. The conversion of reduced nitrogen provided by a variety of microbes, like blue-green bacteria, to nitrate has recently been discovered to take place thanks to a previously unrecognized group of archaea called ‘crens’. They are present in most soils, in most ecosystems on planet earth. Bacteria don’t convert much ammonia to nitrate, crens do. This opens up vistas for further developments in microbially enhanced fertility regimes to increase the output of organic food.

Since part of our work with seeds was to provide for the kinds of foods we love to eat and flowers that improve our moods and gardens, we began with our favorite garden crops: sweet corn, broccoli, onions, winter squash, peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, marigolds, sunflowers and zinnias.

At the same time, we were fortunate to collaborate with Dr. Sarangamat Gurusiddiah, head of the Bioanalytical Laboratory at Washington State University at Pullman, WA (since retired), in making hundreds of amino acid analyses of organically grown crops looking of nutritional selection criteria for many of our crops. Nutribud broccoli, one of our brassica cultivars was found to have significant amounts of glutamine, one of the energy sources for our brains, hence the name.

Since we originally began growing food with heirloom cultivars, it soon became apparent that some heirlooms did better than others in terms of vigor, productivity, seed production and food quality. We chose and continue to look for fine heirlooms as parents in making new kinds.

After growing more than 200 varieties of tomatoes during our decades of organic gardening, we had established preferences and picked our favorites for parents. It takes just a few minutes to make a cross. It takes many months and years to follow the cross to new and improved varieties.

While our first crosses were with heirlooms, now many new kinds come from the intercrossing of varieties that have taken us years to develop. Familiarity and experience is necessary to sustaining and developing worthwhile new cultivars.

A key aspect of laying out a garden for developing new varieties is to know the how’s, what’s and when’s for each and every kind of plant. Are the plants insect, bird, bat, ant, wind or water pollinated? Are there complete flowers, ones with both pollen and stigmas, or plants with male and female flowers on the same plant or are there both male plants and female plants? And then there are the critical issues of inbreeding and outcrossing. Some plants like sunflowers, brassicas and cucurbits prefer to outbreed. Others like tomatoes, legumes and marigolds are usually self-fertile.

Then there is timing. So many aspects of fertility have to do with timing. When the flowers open, when the pollen is mature, when the stigmas are receptive, whether the sun is shining or rain is a’fallin, the emergence of insects thru their metamorphosis from larva to pupa to adult, the direction and timing of the wind, the daily and diurnal temperature and the many kinds of intervention that a gardener or plant breeder can interpose to aid or limit pollination are all important in the conjunctions that lead to seed production.

Taking your hand to seed collecting and plant breeding opens possibilities for uniquenesses in your garden, new vistas that unfold with each crop and each garden with the unknown as a friend and ally involving yourself in sustainable ecology and the paradigm shifts coming with new discoveries about life.