|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 19, 2010 22:47:59 GMT -5
In mid September I planted a couple thousand corn seeds from many varieties. They germinated and started growing. We have received frost most nights for the last week. Some of the corn died. A few leaves withered on some plants. And some plants show no frost damage. Even if zero plants survive the winter, I am happy to learn that there is lots of variation in corn plant hardiness, and that some corn plants are tolerant of frost.
Just to show how little expectation I have of finding a corn that will overwinter... I planted the corn in the same furrows that I planted my winter wheat.
Regards, Joseph
|
|
|
Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Oct 23, 2010 16:19:04 GMT -5
Joseph, What will you do if some corn doesn't germinate now, but does germinate in spring? Wont that effectively "bypass" your test, and taint your results?
...I'm wondering if cold hardiness has something to do with the potential of a plant to become perennial. Something cool i have to report is, that all of my corn is dead except two plants. But, one is a known perennial teosinte with about twenty tillers, and the other is also suspected as being a perennial teosinte. They both are completely green. A known annual teosinte nearby also died, but it was still rather green long after the corn near it had died.
...I wasn't able to specifically breed any teosinte-corn hybrids this year as the pollen from the annual teosinte started after most corn cobbs were done growing, and the only tassel from the perennial was broken off by a squirrel before pollen was available.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 23, 2010 17:10:01 GMT -5
I stewed about that for a long time before planting. I finally decided that if corn grows in the spring... Then either I have found a perennial corn, or I have found corn seeds that can survive overwinter under snow. In either case I will be delighted, even if I can't really tell which happy occurrence it was.
Some corn-like grasses survive the winter by sending down rhizome-like roots that burrow deep enough to escape frost.
I'll be very interested to hear about how your teosinte does.
|
|
|
Post by DarJones on Oct 23, 2010 22:28:12 GMT -5
I hate Johnson grass. It is rhizome central.
|
|
|
Post by darwinslair on Oct 27, 2010 20:01:06 GMT -5
I have had corn seed overwinter in the ground, but not corn plants.
My Bear Island Flint survived 3 hard freezes this spring, just touched the ends of the leaves, and grew just fine.
Tom
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Nov 1, 2010 14:27:42 GMT -5
We've had a few weeks of overnight air temperatures around 25 to 30 degrees with additional radiative cooling at leaf level. All of the new corn shoots appear to be dead (or at least frozen to below ground level). The winter wheat is doing fine.
On Friday I chopped through a 1.5" frozen soil crust in order to plant garlic cloves and Egyptian onions.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 18, 2010 11:27:59 GMT -5
I planted a few thousand corn seeds on December 15th since the snow melted enough to expose bare soil. We'll see if any of them have what it takes to survive in the soil until spring... It's been snowing again since then.
They were sweets, and flours, and flints, and dents, and se: just whatever I had laying around.
|
|
|
Post by silverseeds on Dec 18, 2010 14:37:22 GMT -5
I planted a few thousand corn seeds on December 15th since the snow melted enough to expose bare soil. We'll see if any of them have what it takes to survive in the soil until spring... It's been snowing again since then. They were sweets, and flours, and flints, and dents, and se: just whatever I had laying around. I think your likely to have much higher germination then it sounds like your expecting. some will start earlier then others is all.
|
|
|
Post by Hristo on Dec 18, 2010 15:46:03 GMT -5
I agree with silverseeds, spring germinating kernels accidentally burrowed past year are common for me. That is true for all cucurbits I grow and potatoes too. The problem is our winter temps are not stable at all (fresh example - last night it was -12.6C, currently (10.30 p.m.) it's +3C and I do not expect to fall below 0). The warm 1-2 weeks spells are very common throughout winter and early spring, so too often the seeds germinate 1-3 weeks earlier than our average last frost date and then even one hour with sub zero temperature kills them (though the potatoes will re-sprout). In other words the autumn sowing is like Coin flipping for me.
|
|
|
Post by mnjrutherford on Dec 21, 2010 16:14:14 GMT -5
I agree with silverseeds, spring germinating kernels accidentally burrowed past year are common for me. That is true for all cucurbits I grow and potatoes too. Really? Potatoes left in ground over winter will sprout and grow? HMMMM.... we weren't sure about this. We planted a second round of potatoes in mid-August but only a few came up. I harvested them for our Thanksgiving dinner. Anyway, the whole plot was in potatoes and we figured what the heck, see what happens to them. If they produce as well as if spring planted, it might be better for us to fall plant? What are your over wintered potatoes like when harvested?
|
|
|
Post by grunt on Dec 21, 2010 17:55:20 GMT -5
Anyone who has grown potatoes knows this is so = there are always volunteers the next year, from the ones you missed at harvest time. Provided it doesn't get wet enough to make your seed potatoes rot, it's IMO the best way to do spuds = they get the earliest start possible, and are up and running when they should be.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 21, 2010 18:22:29 GMT -5
In my garden 4 out of 5 years any potatoes left in the ground are killed overwinter. I presume just from plain old cold, not from soil moisture. I guess that one year in five there is a combination of snow cover and temperatures that make survival possible at least for some percentage of plants. When potatoes do survive here it is an isolated plant here or there, nothing even close to the numbers that were left in the soil.
Last year, most of my garlic died overwinter. That is a 1 year in 10 occurrence.
Our traditional corn planting date is 3 weeks before the average last frost. This year I am intending to plant a few thousand seeds a month earlier than that, just to see if anything has really good cold/frost tolerance.
|
|
|
Post by atash on Dec 22, 2010 1:55:53 GMT -5
In your climate probably not soil moisture as they tolerate even our rainy winters, but the combination of cold and wet is hard on them especially if drainage is poor. In my sandy loam no problem. What really does them in is freezing.
What I don't understand, and maybe just some genes haven't been isolated yet, or there are some environmental factors going on, but supposedly wild potatoes occur naturally as far south as south-central Chile.
Um...OK...it snows there. They get frost just like we do at similar latitudes. It seems to me with careful searching it should be possible to find wild potatoes that have some frost resistance in their tubers.
Unless something odd is going on like only the tubers buried below frost level survive. That could be the case. On our coast, someone gave the Makah Amerindians some potatoes, that continued surviving feral after they lost interest in growing them (the Makah are non-agrarian is/was true of all the tribes here that I am aware of). Potatoes can survive feral here simply because the ground doesn't freeze deep enough to kill all the tubers and runners. But all the shallow ones are killed, because they have negligible frost tolerance.
Tom Wagner and I would like to breed some frost-resistant potatoes if it is possible. If nothing else a potato that were as coldhardy as an onion would reduce the risk of losing all your potatoes from freezing.
There are potatoes whose "vines" are actually somewhat frost resistant. Not to severe prolonged frost--they froze out this year when temps hit the teens in some of the hinterlands (I dunno how cold my farm got--probably not that cold), but they routinely withstand mild overnight frosts. Amazing to see potato plants in November that have survived both late blight (that is ubiquitous here due to winters that aren't cold enough to kill the spores) and overnight frosts. In case it's not obvious these are not commercial potatoes, but potatoes from Tom's collection that either were bred from wild species, or come from high elevations in the Andes where mild overnight frost is possible probably year-round.
I understand why you would hate it; it is notorious for its vigor and tenacity. If by Johnson Grass you mean Sorghum halapense (just making sure in case the same common name might apply to a different plant than the one I know that name as), it poses an interesting problem as regards perennial crops: they risk becoming weeds when it's time to rotate them out! Pieces of rhizome could survive and come back as weeds in the new crop.
Sorghum bicolor has probably been sharing genes with its rhizomous Indian cousin S. propinquum for a while now. That's probably how perennial S. bicolors occur from time to time. But usually their hybrids end up as uselessly small-seeded weeds--such as S. halapense, which it turns out is a naturally-occurring tetraploid hybrid between the two. Thanks to slightly more cold resistance, and rhizomes, it is a cold-hardy perennial weed that occurs as far north as Canada! I think it occurs in most states, including mine.
It was reading about the background of S. halapense that convinced me that perennial cereals might have some production issues. Imagine growing perennial wheat, and when it's time to rotate it out, you plow it under, only to have your crop of peas or soybeans invaded by gigantic numbers of unwanted wheat plants that sprout from the surviving divisions!
|
|
|
Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Dec 22, 2010 11:59:55 GMT -5
I think it's similar here. I haven't invested much time into trying to grow potatoes, but it's almost a natural instinct that the potatoes would rot here. Even some potatoes i planted last spring died suddenly. I suspect it's because they were in a shady area that also happened to be the coldest part of the yard. I'm pretty sure it just rotted away. Kind of reminds me of the Irish potato famine. I definably wouldn't risk my life on potatoes here.
Yeah, not just cereal crops either. I would imagine the more perennial a crop is the less it might produce as most nutrients would go into root production. Of course, maybe thats why people like onions and other bulb crops. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but something to think about. In the case of a futuristic perennial corn it might have smaller cobbs, or maybe just produce them less frequently.
They might pose a problem if you did crop rotation. But, perhaps it would just force people to figure out a way to provide some sort of organic mulch to continually enrich the soil instead of crop rotation. I don't know.
|
|
|
Post by atash on Dec 22, 2010 12:43:27 GMT -5
That's an interesting problem you've brought up, that probably impacts grain crops, because they are seeds. I think the original reason that annuals were favored for grain production was because they put all their energies into their seeds.
Once a perennial has stored away resources in its roots, there is less urgency to continue doing so forever--in fact, at some point the urgency shifts from the root, which is undergoing senescence, to seeds, which are an investment in the future.
So although currently perennial cereals undergo peak productivity their first year (I don't know why; that's experimental results from various institutions that have tested them), it is logically possible that their productivity would peak in later years, same as fruit and nut trees.
The current situation might be a result of their growth habits. They probably die out or at least go senesent in the center of the plant and produce unproductive "holes" in the field. Sort of like a fairy ring.
|
|