Partners

Barn Swallow Farm is excited to partner with two other local farms this year! We’ll be able to provide a more diverse variety of products as well as develop deeper relationships with the other local sustainable farmers.

Ben Wiebe

Restoration Farm

Ben comes from a long lineage of Mennonite farmers, ending with his grandparents’ families who grew wheat in the great plains and herded cattle by horseback in Kansas’ flint hills, but who, like many in their generation, left their family farms behind to pursue other careers. His own personal interest in growing things began in middle school when his grandpa helped him start a backyard vegetable garden. After the first year, harvesting produce from seeds he had sown, he was hooked. He rapidly expanded, filling the garden with way too many exciting vegetable varieties than would be advisable, considering his otherwise busy summer schedules.

Ben’s interest in nature and the environment led him to study ecology at Goshen College, with an emphasis on restoration ecology. It was only after college that he had the realization that small-scale, diversified farming could combine his interests in food, nature, gardening, and restoring landscapes in an exciting career. He worked on vegetable, livestock, and perennial fruit farms in both New Mexico and Sweden, and studied under Richard Perkins at Ridgedale Permaculture before returning to Indiana in 2019, hoping to farm. He was grateful to a friend for introducing him to Restoration Farm, a collectively-owned 80-acre pasture-based livestock farm, as a site to further get his feet wet in various forms of regenerative farming and continue learning from others more seasoned than he! Besides farming, Ben enjoys playing Bach cello suites, riding bike, and playing tug of war with his dog.

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Caroline & Brendan Tubbs

Pumpkin Tree Farm

Hi, we’re Brendan and Caroline Tubbs with Pumpkin Tree Farm! We are urban gardeners and makers in South Bend, with a passion for keeping chickens and fish.

For years Brendan has dabbled in gardening and keeping chickens. Even when all he had room for was an aquaponics system with tomatoes and goldfish on his apartment balcony. When he bought his first home in South Bend, he built raised beds in the backyard right away. Caroline was eager to help with the garden, and in that first growing season, one of our pumpkins grew into a tree! We dubbed that pumpkin, “tree pumpkin”. Since then we’ve grown pumpkins in our garden every year.

In 2018, we got 6 egg-laying chicks. Three ameraucanas, two silver laced wyandottes, and one ancona. All but one (one turned out to be a rooster that we couldn’t keep) live very comfortably in the coop we built in the backyard.

Keeping backyard chickens had Brendan missing the time when he kept meat chickens in 2013. With a mission to provide locally grown chicken meat, we decided to partner with Barn Swallow Farm! We’re happy to share our love for sustainable, local farming. Learn more about us at thepumpkintreefarm.com, or email us at pumpkintreefarm@gmail.com.

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