Native Seeds/SEARCH

For those in the process of ordering seeds for this season, don't pass up the valuable landraces and genetics available via Native Seeds/SEARCH out in Arizona. Lots of beautiful Native American varieties from the southwest are available there including a couple of nice primitive sweet corns and a ton of beautiful beans and Amaranth varieties. Most of these varieties are very drought tolerant and send out deep roots. We have had some difficulty in growing some of these crops here in the humid and wet Ohio Valley but we have also had some real winners and made some great crosses that have given us the traits which we were seeking. There are lots of "sacred" landraces used for ceremonies available, diversity is also extensive!.

Bill Hicks Last Letterman Performance to finally be televised.

According to the official Bill Hicks Web-Site and his official Myspace page, the final unaired performance of Bill Hicks just months prior to his death from Pancreatic Cancer will air tonight on the the Late Show with David Letterman. Bills mother will also be present for this event. For those who don't know about Bill Hicks, do yourself a favor and check him out. He is a constant source of inspiration to Kim and I and a true free spirit who died far too young. I highly suggest you check this out. If you don't know the history of why this clip never aired back in October of 1993 do a little research on the net.

January Snow and Ice Storm

I was going to try to get a picture up of the snow and ice that fell here over the past few days. Several inches overall. It pulled down powerlines all over the place. Luckilly we were only without power for about five or six hours or so, so not too bad, particularly compared with the wind storm we had back in September when we were without power for five days. The good news is that we are getting ready later in the year to make the leap to off the grid living via solar power and solar generators. More on that later.

We didn't sustain much damage up here on the farm, I did have to stay awake on the night of the storm and repeatedly remove the ice and snow from the two large greenhouses with a push broom along with the chicken coop.

Unfortunately our neighbor didn't fare so well. Two of his large chicken coops fell under the weight of the snow and ice, He lost about 50,000 chickens. Though I don't like the idea of corporate farming of this type, I feel deeply for him and his family and their loss.

Have I mentioned that I deeply dislike winter? I think I have SAD, seasonal affective disorder, I just can't deal with being cooped up at all. I'm sure Kim is getting tired of me asking her if it is spring yet.

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!

Hip-Gnosis Seed Development Updates

Recently Kim and I have made an effort to organize our seed collections in such a way to make them easier to catalog, propagate, and characterize. I hadn't realized the diversity of our seed collection until just yesterday when we finished. As I sat looking at the finished seed room (actually a large closet) the scope of such genetics hit me square on! Imagine for a moment if you will, the number of generations of gardeners preserving unique varieties in our seed room, the number of years by each gardener spent selecting for new types, the number of generations of entrepid ancient seed developers it took to turn any of these crops wild ancestors into human food, and that is only taking into account the pure genetics we are keeping. Imagine for a moment if you will the amount of human history in one of our breeding experiments such as "Astronomy Domine" sweet corn. Literally tens of thousands of years of cumulative human endevor. Living in my closet! Breeding in my fields! It truly is amazing. Imagine the blood, sweet, and tears poured into these crops. Philosophical fertility if you will!

And it still amazes me the amount of diversity passing through our mailbox on a daily basis! There are three lifetimes worth of work to be done here!

In that spirit, Kim and I have decided to expand our business next fall into the realm of a small seed catalog. More like a seed list. We plan to pack this short list with various pure and genetic combinations that are rare, hard to find, or otherwise overlooked. In the meantime we have created a proto type of this catalog, mostly to give us an idea of what we should be bulking seeds from next season, I don't want to sound conceited, but I am already impressed! Hip-Gnosis Seed Development will offer a greatly expanded assortment next season. It was long past time for us to step up and fill in the gaps in the worlds seed selections, now we are determined to do so!

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!

UK Telegraph Website creating propaganda? Warnings? Fear mongering?

Take from this what you will, personally I find this disgusting and more than a little "weird". Recently the London Telegraph has been under heavy scrutiny due to their posting of some photo galleries depicting London being blown apart by an atomic bomb as part of a terrorist attack.. More recently they posted a secondary photo gallery depicting New York, Washington DC, Portland, Toronto, Mexico City and Los Angeles suffering the same fate. As though this were not enough, in part 3 they post very specific Illuminati propaganda in regards to the North American Union, Homeland Security, and very Nazi-like images of an eagle symbol as well as the Latin phrase “Norvus Ordo Seclorum" (new order of the ages).

If you don't find this in the least offensive, I'm really not sure what else I can say to you in regards to the current direction of our world to really get you to open your eyes and at least take a secondary look at what is going on. Is this a warning? Is this propaganda? Who knows. What I do know is it is disgusting, and the very same folks who dream up this type of bull shit are the types who are running our countries. If something of this magnitude were ever to happen, clearly it wouldn't bode well for anyone, but who would get the blame? Who would deserve the blame is what you need to ask? Any operation of this size would reek of "false flag" propaganda, and yet I wonder, would we as several nations of diverse and unique people question what we see as "reality"?