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Post by raymondo on Apr 15, 2012 23:07:25 GMT -5
Someone has given me a mix of corns for my flour corn project, one of which is a huge, white kernel type from Peru which will, in all likelihood, flower very late preventing the addition of its genes to my mix. I'm hoping a way round this might be to sow the few kernels I have of this corn in pots, indoors very early. The pots, hopefully will keep the plants on the small side. I could then succession sow a short season corn, also in pots. Hopefully, this way, I'd get at least a few of the short season corn silking at the same time as the late season corn is shedding pollen. Apart from the hassle, I see no reason why this wouldn't work. being in pots, I could bring the corns inside to finish off.
Okay, some questions. Is this plan feasible? Has anyone tried it? And importantly, is 'lateness' a 'dominant' trait? Will I have to grow the F1 in pots to finish off indoors?
Much obliged for any input.
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Post by DarJones on Apr 15, 2012 23:26:22 GMT -5
Corn tasseling is phytochrome moderated meaning that it is sensitive to the number of hours of daylight it is exposed to. Just bringing it in or out of a building in a pot will not work unless you also reduce the number of hours of daylight to about 12 hours per day. Forcing the plants to live in a restricted pot will be partially effective at inducing early flowering. Reducing hours of sunlight is the other half of the equation.
DarJones
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Post by templeton on Apr 15, 2012 23:58:09 GMT -5
D, Is it a minimum day length that initiates it, or a reducing day length? - I might have a bit of a go with corn next season T
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Post by raymondo on Apr 16, 2012 3:17:31 GMT -5
Thanks Dar. By mid autumn we have around 12 hours of daylight but of course we also have frosts. So, my strategy might work, as long as I don't forget to bring them in each afternoon.
Perhaps Dar will be able to answer your question T.
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Post by DarJones on Apr 16, 2012 8:23:27 GMT -5
It is pretty specific with tropical corn that it will not flower until it is getting 13 hours or less of sunlight per day.
DarJones
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Post by johninfla on Apr 16, 2012 8:34:49 GMT -5
How long will pollen stay good? What I mean to ask is, could you collect pollen this year, store it in the freezer and fertilize the silks with it next year?
John
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2012 13:00:33 GMT -5
If you have the ability to do so, I would sow the Peruvian seeds in pots whenever you start your other corns, then take them into a dark place each evening at whatever time is needed to cut the daylength down to 12.5 hours or less. The plants should only get 6 - 7 feet tall under those conditions and ought to be in mid-silk after about 1230'F GDU's (I have a daylength-neutral Cuzco strain, and that's about how much heat it takes). You can then cross-pollinate it with a super-early strain and sibling mate the F1s next season. The F2s will have a moderate frequency of daylength neutral genes. (I think complete photoperiod insensitivity is a recessive trait.) If you want to recover a higher proportion of the Peruvian's genes, then you can backcross it to the pure Peruvian variety, sib-mate, back cross, sib-mate, and so on until you recover the desired amount of Peruvian genes.
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Post by raymondo on Apr 16, 2012 16:45:19 GMT -5
If you have the ability to do so, I would sow the Peruvian seeds in pots whenever you start your other corns, then take them into a dark place each evening at whatever time is needed to cut the daylength down to 12.5 hours or less... I doubt I'd be able to manage that for any length of time, but it's an interesting idea. I wonder if I grew the few seeds I have in pots, then at a certain point cut down their daylight hours (I have a pantry with no windows) just long enough to initiate flowering, would that work? Hmmm...how long would it take to initiate flowering? And once initiated, would it continue if I put the pots back outside permanently? The advantage of doing as you suggest is that I could use the Peruvian corn as seed parent as well as pollen parent and add the Peruvian cytoplasmic DNA to my mix.
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Post by templeton on Apr 16, 2012 17:09:16 GMT -5
Grow lights? Get someone in Cairns to grow them and overnight freight you some pollen? ;D The successional planting of the early corn should do the trick tho, shouldn't it? Will depend on the day length flowering triggers of that variety as well, won't it. Would an intermediate parent help? cross the early to the inter, cross the inter to the the late, grow out both crosses, select, cross back to the early...sounding pretty complicated... T
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Post by Hristo on Apr 16, 2012 17:40:59 GMT -5
How long will pollen stay good? What I mean to ask is, could you collect pollen this year, store it in the freezer and fertilize the silks with it next year? John If my memory serves me well at normal conditions corn pollen is quite short living, usually a few hours. And looks like that even freeze-preservation is not that simple and effective as with some other pollens. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0011224075900425
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 16, 2012 18:58:22 GMT -5
The last two years I have grown day-length sensitive corns... The first year I got a harvest because the corn was in a micro-environment that protected it from our first fall frosts and it matured during our Indian summer. Two other plantings growing in the open field didn't produce seed.
Last year, the corn produced pollen in the open field, but didn't mature seed before it was killed by frost... If there had been a sweet corn at the right stage of maturity to accept pollen, the sweet corn would have matured before frost.
My intention this year is to grow the tropical corn right next to the east side of the house under the eves... This might effectively shorten the day length (Thanks Dar)... And then plant a crop of 60 day sweet corn about once a week so that I can have silks receptive to pollen at the right time.
Perhaps the year after if I still need shorter day-length, I could put a curtain under the eves, and close it in the afternoon. This could also act as a frost-protection greenhouse late in the season.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2012 19:38:22 GMT -5
Raymundo, I'm not entirely sure about how long the plants would have to be exposed to artificially short days before they would begin silking, but I'm pretty sure it's more than a week, probably around two. The problem with what you're wanting to do is, re-lengthening the days too soon can cause the plants to switch off their reproductive hormones, abort the ears, and go back into vegetative mode. You could probably stop taking them in a month after silking, at which point they would have their growth hormones completely turned off. Once you've used the Peruvian strain's pollen to fertilize the daylength neutral variety's ears, you can quit bothering with it.
Templeton: Yes, it's a lot of work, but tropical strains possess some very desirable traits not found in the genetically-bottlenecked temperate maize genepool, and cycles of backcrossing and sib-mating recover material that would otherwise be lost when the late individuals from the initial cross are culled out. Cross the Peruvian x temperate F2 back to the pure Peruvian, and you've now got a 75 % Peruvian - 25% temperate ratio, then 87.5% - 12.5% and so on, with sibbing after each backcross keeping the desirable daylength neutral genes from being eliminated in the process.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2012 19:58:54 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2012 20:03:41 GMT -5
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Post by raymondo on Apr 16, 2012 20:55:39 GMT -5
Interesting ideas. Thanks everyone. I'm looking forward to playing around with it. I can't grow a huge field of it but I could easily manage 400-500 plants, which should be enough to develop what I want.
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