CSA application period extended to end of April!

A new local/regional CSA program alternative. Providing more convenience and better value to our community.

Bishop’s Homegrown is a small “Eco-Logical” and self sustainable farm in the town of Pekin Indiana. We are family owned and a fourth generation farm focused on providing quality produce from yesteryear as well as the new food and flower crops of the future to our valued friends and community members. We use the strictest possible organic guidelines for on farm food production and make no exceptions. We feel that it is of utmost importance that locavores, members of the slow food movement, and community members, know who and from where their food comes from and how it is grown. We produce 90% of our own seed crops as well as 100% of our own organic fertilizer and we never ever opt for chemical options to control pests or disease issues on farm, feeling that growing food “eco-logically” is the only alternative to our failing food system in the United States. We have searched the world over to bring you the most unique, exciting, and rare food crops from diverse cultures the world over with an emphasis on nutrition and taste! Our doors are always open to our community and customers who we encourage to visit the farm in order to see and know where and how their food was grown. Food security begins when a relationship is formed between the community and its farmers, this essential connection is what allowed civilization to flourish 10,000 years ago. This year we would like to introduce you to our newest program which we feel you will find immense value in!
The Farm Stand Credit Program:
The concept of Community Supported Agriculture (AKA. CSA) is generally defined as a mutually beneficial arrangement between a farmer and his customer wherein the customer agrees to share in the risks and rewards of local farming for the benefit of their food production and the farmers well being. The CSA consumers become by proxy shareholders in the farm and it’s well being by paying an upfront “membership“ due which covers the production of food in a “share“ system. Generally a traditional CSA allows for the consumer to pay for up front costs of the farmers start up cost with the farmer reciprocating by preparing a pre-determined amount of produce every week through the growing season which the shareholders pick up once a week. The farmer generally picks the produce that the customer will receive.
This year Bishop’s Homegrown is looking to create a viable alternative to the traditional CSA program by creating a farm stand coupon program which will allow customers to still share in helping us get our business going during the part of the season in which seed and implements and other essentials are being purchased while also making the relationship more convenient for the farmer and the shareholders.
In this arrangement, instead of the farmer putting together a box of produce weekly he has selected for you you will instead receive “credit” from our farm which will allow you to visit our farm stand or farm where you can make your selection of produce that we have available including also a selection of seedlings, nursery stock, seeds, compost, poultry and other items from our farm. This gives you the opportunity to decide what you want instead of us deciding what you want. Every $100 you invest will also get you a 10% discount which means that you will actually get 10% more produce for your food dollars.
Our produce will be available to you via the Washington County Indiana farmers market held at the fairgrounds in Salem Indiana on Saturday Mornings from 8 AM to 12 PM. Occasionally we also will be available at the Wednesday market operating during the same hours. Credit is also redeemable at our roadside stand in the town of Peking or on farm. It is important to note that we don’t usually deal in custom ordered bulk produce on a normal basis (i.e., a bushel beans, or a bushel of corn) but that when these items are available at market, as they often are, your credit can be used to purchase them as well.
FAQ’s:
How much does it cost?
The investment levels start at 50.00. An investment at the 100 dollar or above level will earn you a 10% discount which means that an investment at the $100 level only costs you $90! That’s right; $100 dollars of credit only costs $90! That’s essentially the same as getting $10 of produce free just for paying ahead of time! Your credit is good for two years which means that whatever isn’t spent this season can be carried over to next season!
The maximum investment is $500.
Here is the layout:
$50 credit for $50
$100 credit for $90
$200 credit for $180
$300 credit for $270
$400 credit for $360
$500 credit for $450
How will we keep track of your credit?
Good old fashioned pen and pencil, anytime you make a purchase we will deduct that price from our ledger. You will receive a receipt after each transaction so you too can keep track of the amount of produce purchased.
What if I make it to market late and you are out of what I want?
Unfortunately this may happen from time to time which is why we are keeping the investment level low to start with. Sometimes we just flat out run out of an item due to popularity. The best bet is to show up to market early, the best of the best goes quickly! There are occasions when we may not be able to make it to market from time to time due to emergencies or just the need to take a break here and there but we will inform you a few days ahead of time via e-mail (unless it’s a last minute emergency) that we will not be at market in the coming week.
What can I purchase with Bishop’s homegrown credit? Does this offer only include produce?
No, any item we bring to market is eligible for purchase via this credit, including seeds, plants, seedlings, poultry (chicks), occasionally rabbits, compost, fishing worms, handcrafts or any other product we have at market or our farm stand. We also occasionally have winter produce available and this Thanksgiving and Christmas we will for the first time be offering butchered heritage turkeys.
When is payment due and how do I pay, when does credit take effect?
Payment is due by the end of March in order that we know what we have in the bank and can plan accordingly. Payment can be made by check, money order, or well concealed cash. Credit takes effect the first Saturday of May, in conjunction with the opening of the farmers market.
Make checks or money orders payable to:
Alan Bishop
And send to:
Alan Bishop
5604 S. State Rd. 60
Pekin IN 47165
Also include a note with your full name, address, e-mail address, phone number and a list of people who you will allow to purchase items with your credit if you need to send someone to the farm stand in your place!

How can I learn more about Bishop’s Homegrown and follow the on farm developments?
We invite you to come and take a tour of our small farm at any time you would like to learn more about us or at any point during the growing season, before, after, or even if you don’t join the credit opportunity. We also maintain a blog at
http://homegrowngoodness.blogspot.com where we often write research articles, report about our plant breeding and poultry breeding projects, explain our on farm techniques and more. As well we run a small message board for experimental gardeners and plant breeders located at http://alanbishop.proboards60.com as well as our local harvest site located at http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M24902
We should also point out that farm tours are available to those interested at any time in the growing season…
Please feel free to pass this around to others who might be interested in joining this unique opportunity.
Feel free to contact us at:
Alan Bishop
1-812-967-2073
Or
bishops
homegrown@gmail.com

Baby Rabbits for sale!

The rabbits in the pictures below will be weaned by the begining of next week, just in time for Easter, most are a combination of white with gray splotches and some are pure white. Will make the perfect Easter gift for that special someone. $6 each. Give us a call: 812-967-2073

Rabbits for sale!

Easter is coming up soon and as such we have prepared ourself by breeding our first round of baby rabbits ever.

Should make wonderful pets, breeding stock, or meat animals.

If you live locally and are interested we are asking $6.00 a piece for the young ones, they would make a fantastic Easter gift for children or grand children!

Heres some pics for ya!

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!

The snow says it's still winter....

But you'd be thinking otherwise when you look at all the signs of spring around the farm.

3 nests of baby bunnies, an incubator full of eggs, a second incubator in staging, a brooder full of Pintade (French Guineas) and roosters, and flats full of various Brassicacea sowed into La Bonne Terre soil blocks.

As soon as the snow melts we will be hard(er) at work!

A fantastic Interview with Dr. John Navazio via seeds of change.

Well it snowed here, a lot, and because of that snow I am tending to stay close to the house a bit more and spend some time studying before the season kicks in hard. Later this week I'll be making a couple thousand soil blocks and starting seeds. Some have already been started for the greenhouse project, I've also got some new baby rabbits, my first experience with rabbit kindling and it's going pretty well so far. One of the incubators is full of turkey eggs as well and during all of this I am attempting to kick my bad smoking habbit, so even when it's slow it's still a bit busy.

That being said, while looking around the net for some information regarding a few seed varieties I am searching for I came accross an interesting and very informative interview via Seeds Of Change with plant breeder extrodinaire Dr. John Navazio. Anyone with an interest in seed saving, self sustainable agriculture or particularly plant breeding should check it out, there is a ton of good information in there particularly in regards to selecting from a diverse set of genetics (without any actual cross polinating) for new varieties of food and flower plants. I think after reading this many more of you will veiw yourselves as plant breeders as opposed to seed savers after reading this one.

The interview is here:

http://www.seedsofchange.com/market_growers/field_report_navazio_32.aspx

Invasion of the corn!

I've been spending a lot of time studying corns this year (that's nothing new), I should elaborate on that, other corn options.

Particularly while working on Astronomy Domine, it's various selections, as well as new crosses I have been also working on a new Dent Corn variety called Amanda Palmer (yeah, after the infamous Dresden Dolls lead singer) for use as a feed for my poultry flock as well as for human consumption and for sale as an ornamental or wildlife type feed. There are a lot of criteria that must be met.

-Stalk Strenght, if it lodges it's worthless in the midwest.
-Productivity, mass selection is getting me where I want to go
-Protein, 8-13% in various selections at the moment
-Looks, if I'm going to sell secondaries as human food or ornamental stock it's got to look nice, the germplasm that I have used in breeding has met my expectations and exceeded them.
-Tolerance to Stewards Wilt as well as Rust of which I've not yet had any issue (knocks on wood)
-Good, tight all encompassing husk. This is necessary to keep corn insects out.
-Standability, important to me because all of this corn (usually about 3 acres) will have to be harvested by hand which means that sometimes it stays in the field a bit longer than reccomended
-Storability, getting where I want, Slowly.

At first, like with Astronomy Domine, I was ussing reccurent mass selection, now days I have converted to Ear To Row selection, a method which works much better at increasing yeilds and slecting for traits which we want/need. The varieties that were included in the original genepool of this material are
-Bloody Butcher
-Daemon Morgan's Kentucky Butcher (the source of the large kernal and chinmark traits I am selecting for)
-Cherokee White Eagle
-Boone County white
-Lancaster Sure Crop
-Reids Yellow Dent

All of these varieties are near the exact same DTM and plant types and the yield is very similar as well, it would have certainly have been easier just to rely on one of these varieties, but no individual accession met all my needs and what fun would it be to rely on an old standby when I can breed something new and innovative for both myself and for others. This new genepool/synthetic/composite will be available from Face Of The Earth Seed company when it launches in Fall of 2010


Other areas of corn interest now days I can attribute directly to my friends Alan Kapuler and Carol Deppe who have really inspired me to look into alternative type corn crops for my health (which I am trying to improve, attempting to quit smoking as we speak and placing an order for a bicycle) and the health of my parents as well as creating a niche market for corn of a type other than sweet in the local area.

As an example. I have never in the past had much of an itnerest in parched corns, locally at historical fairs they usually use sweet corns for parching, not a ton of flavor but covered with a ton of salt, increadibly unhealthy and not very tasty. I have been missing out. True parch corns are all flour corns with a soft texture and sweet/almost nutty flavor making them worth seeking out and introducing to a wider audience, there also hasn't been a ton of breeding work done in this area which leaves the opporotunity open for developing novel new germplasm lines. I recently placed an order for a 1/2 pound of Supai Parch which was selected by Kapuler and Deppe, this will give me a heads up on my breeding by giving me a fixed variety for home use and for sale at market as an alternative crop, sure I'll have to develop a market and educate about parch type corns, but that's part of the fun. Plus supai apparently makes a great flour as well. Many flour corns were bred and maintained by the Native Americans (along with dents and flints.) and Kapuler and Deppe grew out several of them back in the mid 90's, initially selecting and increasing 8 of them.

I am also playing around a bit with Painted Mountain corn and Bear Island Flint for various reasons, some of which detailed below.

I am thankful to friends at Homegrown Goodness who have helped me to track down some painted mountain corn, it is greatly appreciated.

A few notes about selective breeding and the project I am working on regarding painted mountain.

One reason for seeking out such early germplasm for a climate such as mine in Southern Indiana where we can actually grow really long season corns is to hedge bets against climate change (no, not supposed global warming) such as was experienced in 1816 via the year without a summer. Feeding ourselves and our livestock will be of utmost importance.

I have in the past grown painted mountain, mostly for fun, but I haven't been particular about selecting and as such I needed some more germplasm and for that I think my friends.

While speaking with Carol Deppe we talked a lot about selective breeding and how one genetically dierse variety can become many individual varieties, we also talked a lot about the cullinary quality of vegetable varieties and targeted breeding regarding cullinary quality, her insights in this are were particularly revealing and I look forward to reading her new book, the section on potatoes alone will deal with a lot of Tom Wagners varieties and their various uses and I think will come in handy for many of our friends here.

Regarding corn she revealed to me that the Alleurone color, pericarp color, and kernel color in general can have a lot of influence on taste. This is something I have picked up on in the past and we discussed a bit the "muddy" flavor that painted mountain tends to impart. Carol herself has been working with Abernaki (Roy's Calicas?) corn for a few years selecting individual color lines with high cullinary quality which she should be releasing in conjunction with her book this August. This comes in handy for many reasons, for one these varieties could be grown in blocks side by side and still be maintained,even with minimal crossign, as individual varieties, or even as one whole varieties, in other words your not going to change the DTM or agronomics of the crop through a bit of crossing between the four individual lines, my plan is to do the same thing with painted mountain, selecting for flower and hard meal properties as well as parching ability (should it be present in the crop). Eventually I plan to release four-six varieties from painted mountain alone.

At the same time I will be evaluating Bear Island for the same qualities.

I also placed an order for some Mandan and Hopi germplasm of flour types via the USDA GRIN system recently for breeding/selection material.

This of course coincides with my collection from Grin of some SE+ or EH sweet corn inbreds for developing some SE varieties for the home garderner. I also pulled out a few Supersweet or SH2 varieties for future work.


Anyhow, if you have some time this week I suggest checking out Corn among the indians of the upper Missouri
located Here (blogger still won't let me link for some reason)
http://books.google.com/books?id=yTkTAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Corn+among+the+indians+of+the+upper+missouri&source=bl&ots=837dujr_pR&sig=4smT8Cr0LLZq4i8SZttGGnqcNvw&hl=en&ei=wV1zS4msBYO1tgeii8TwCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false