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Post by Carol Deppe on Feb 26, 2015 22:26:15 GMT -5
I agree with fusionpower that stable dent varieties don't segregate out flinty or floury types. But lots of varieties are of mixed type for kernel type, and you can select out material that has largely flint or largely floury character. If your mostly dent corn is showing variability from ear to ear and kernel to kernel for kernel type, you can probably select out a flint. If it isn't, you may need to add a good flint to the mix. I wouldn't depend upon the teosinte for flint, because my guess is that is going to introduce a whole lot weird stuff you may need to get rid of that will be linked to genes for kernel type.
You will probably need to start by selecting out the kernels that are most flinty, taking such kernels from as many ears as possible to get the numbers up. Once you have mostly flinty ears, you can get fussier an discard the entire ear if it shows very many dent kernels. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that endosperm is triploid tissue, with 2/3 the contribution coming from the mother plant. So the genes in the baby plant (germ) in the kernel are not quite the same as those in the endosperm of the kernel. In addition, I think genes affecting flint:flour ratio are often codominant and often variable in expression. In addition, you only get the obvious dent if the flint is arranged around the flour just right; otherwise you get a dentless dent. So theoretically it is quite a mess. But practically, it's actually pretty easy. Just keep the glassy kernels and plant those. You will see a huge shift toward more flinty type in even just one generation of selecting.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Feb 26, 2015 22:03:59 GMT -5
Yes. Every kernel on a corn plant can have a different father. In practice, though, even in a nice big corn patch many kernels on an ear will have the same father because a certain nearby plant let off a puff of pollen and the wind current blew it just right to reach your ear. In fact, if you have an obvious off-type nearby, such as a plant with black kernels in a white corn patch, you might have all the black kernels on the ear in a little patch on one side representing that puff of wind, and not other black kernels.
Squash in a patch with many different varieties often have many fathers represented in the seed of each fruit. I think it's because the pollen is released gradually over an hour or so, and the bees come back and make multiple visits. So one flower might get pollinated and repollinated by a dozen bees, each of which had a different flight path visiting different flowers just before. Each bee transfers pollen mostly from the last flower or two it visited. But there are lots of different bee visits.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Dec 6, 2014 1:18:43 GMT -5
Well, maybe I was wrong that I never saw another ear like the one I keep going on about. I forgot about this one. I guess I'll call it Little Red, it was in the bag I planned to feed to the chickens, originally not considered because of its size. It has apx 130 total kernels instead of 600 and each one is about 1/2 the size of a Big Red Kernel so overall it is about 20% the size. It isn't exactly the same color almost a purplish or pinkish shine depending on lighting. The aleurone is similar to Big Red but it is only about 20% white endosperm, the rest is two or three shades of yellow. BUT, it has a very similar great flavor and the qualities of no unpleasant hard chunks or shells. Don't know if I want to mix it in to start but think I should find it a spot to increase it too, just to keep future options open. . This ear could easily be from the same plant as your favorite ear. A small ear because it was the second or third ear on the plant instead of the first. More yellow endosperm because of who happened to be pollinating nearby when the smaller ear was in silk. A somewhat different shade because red percarp is variable in expression, and varies in shade from ear to ear on the same plant as well as even from one end of the ear to the other.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Dec 6, 2014 1:12:13 GMT -5
Next is one of my own that is about half the length and more rows. It has clear pericarp with red chinmarks and about a 1/3 of them are all white otherwise. It also tastes, pretty good. I would suggest keeping this ear separate as a whole project of its own instead of crossing it to your special red ear. The reason is that that chinmark characteristic is itself a great parching flavor (when over white), but is a quite different flavor from the red. But in addition, the pericarp colors are alternatives. So when you have the chinmark pattern you will not have the deepest possible red pattern and flavor I'd plant a little semiisolated patch of the chinmark ear kernels, and among them plant some detasseled White Manna. I'm actually breeding a chinmark sister line to Magic Manna. I think it will be pure enough to introduce in 2016.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Dec 6, 2014 1:01:58 GMT -5
I used to grow 'Hookers Sweet Indian'. It was an early black sweet corn from maritime Washington. It was very uniformly white flint under the black aleurone. I've seen some lines recently that have a good bit of yellow in them, indicating contaminating crossing somewhere along the line. I bought some that Territorial reintroduced last year, and while I haven't planted it yet, I have inspected it for interior color. It appears to be all or nearly all white. Black Aztec also should be white flint underneath the black aleurone if it is pure and the real thing.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Dec 6, 2014 0:52:09 GMT -5
I think that is what I will do. Plant this to increase my supply of it for the next year, it's most important to just try to do that because it is the only ear like this I'v seen. I'm thinking though that I can still get a head start on a possible landrace by mixing in some others and detasseling them. I think this is a good approach. Basically, it's pursuing two approaches at once. Since plant breeding is so delightfully unpredicatable, I usually do just this sort of thing. Figure out more than one approach and try them all. Usually the first year doesn't take much work, and you can figure out what it's best to continue with by the results of the first year. In this case, you would grow a patch of the kernels from the special ear mostly to increase and preserve the genes in that material. But then simultaneously you would be giving the material a chance to show what it can do if you just select from it while simultaneously trying some crosses. The crosses not only give you options as to how to continue. They also can give you information about what is going on with your special ear genetically. In addition to the white line of Magic Manna, I would suggest also planting Mandan Clay Red (aka Parching Lavender Mandan) one of the parching corns I rediscovered and described in that article on parching corn that has been mentioned. It is homozygous for lavender, which is (codominant) purple/black aleurone as modified by homozygous recessive red-aleurone. Mandan Clay Red is very early, almost as early as Painted Mountain. Ears are smaller. But that is undoubtedly because of inbreeding in part, and will self-correct in a cross. MCR is uniform for color. Clear pericarp, homozygous purple plus red-aleurone genes, homozygous white flinty endosperm. (You can get it from Adaptive Seeds, Seed Dreams, or from the USDA.) Fact is, from the photos it is obvious your special ear has a deep red pericarp. But I can't tell whether you have a white aleurone that has been stained reddish from the pericarp (which might be because of the soaking in hot water), or whether you actually have a lavender aleurone. Or both. I think the aleurone has been stained red from the pericarp, but can't tell whether it would have been white otherwise, or was lavender. (The hot water soak was probably counterproductive and screwed up ability to determine aleurone color by staining it with pigment from the pericarp.) Let's suppose, however, that you plant a detasselled row of the mostly white line of Magic Manna (Pancake White Manna) and a detasseled row of Mandan Clay Red. If your special ear is red pericarp over white aleurone, then in the cross to the white Manna you will end up with all white aleurones. (And that cross would be a good one to go forward with to develop a new variety). And furthermore, you will be able to pick out and discard nearly all the contaminating yellow flint. However, if your special ear is red pericarp over lavender (Purple plus red-aleurone) the white manna ears will have nearly all kernels that are either purple/black or lavender aleurone. (So you will learn what is going on with your special ear, but this won't be the right cross to go on with.) Now consider the cross to the detasseled Mandan Clay Red. If your special ear is red pericarp over white aleurone, you'll end up with heterozygosity for purple and red aleurone colors, so lots of pastels or mosaics. And this wouldn't be the right cross to go on with. But if your special ear is red pericarp over lavender aleurone, then you will get nearly all lavender aleurones in the cross, and this would be a great cross to go on with. the lavender aleurone itself gives a wonderful parching corn flavor. And the red pericarp does too.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Dec 3, 2014 16:00:04 GMT -5
Hi Reed-- I've eaten many a kernel with that deep red pericarp, and don't blame you for wanting more. In my experience, it takes homozygous red pericarp, white aleurone, and white flinty endosperm to get that mind-blowing flavor. Since red pericarp is variable in expression, there may well be additional modifying genes also required to get that deep red. So the color you want may well be associated with homozygosity for one dominant and two recessive genes at the least, possible more than two. You can't easily tranfer recessive genes to another variety by recurrent backcrossing. Furthermore, Painted Mountain isn't pure for any of these kernel color genes, including pericarp genes. Your kernels with the pericarp skinned off are showing a strange color. It could be lavender (Dominant Purple modified by recessive red-aleurone.) And that would also work, as lavender has a wonderful flavor parched. However, the color in your photos doesn't really look lavender to me. I suspect you have white aleurone that has been stained by the pigment from thepericarp. Pericarp red pigment is water soluble. I suggest you save half the kernels and plant the rest in a patch by themselves without filing or messing with them, and just increase the population. I'd increase the population before I tried to select the population to get rid of the yellow. What would be ideal would be if that ear has enough genetic heterogeneity in it so that you can produce a whole variety from it just by taking care to eliminate as little of the genetic heterogeneity as possible. So for that, you really need to plant as many kernels as possible next spring, not turn up your nose at those that aren't quite all you want. Once you have a couple hundred ears from a hundred plants you can get fussy and start eliminating the yellow. The mother plant to your special ear was likely to have been homozygous for red pericarp. This means that whatever the pollen parent, every kernel is likely at least heterozygous for pericarp red. But unless there was a lot of pericarp red in the field near that spacial ear-plant, most or all kernels will likely be heterozygous, not homozygous for pericarp red. This means that about half the kernels should give you some shade of red pericarp. Most will be some shade of pink or red. You may not get any deep red at all. Don't be discouraged. When you run the frequency of the gene for the red pericarp up in the population, then you will get lots more deep red ears. Initially I would keep every ear that is pink/red in any shade as well as all those that are white. You will need the white (clear pericarp, no aleurone color) to help you get rid of aleurone colors. And my guess is that you will find that homozygous deep red makes for lower yield and smaller ears, so you can get more vigor with a variety that retains some clear pericarp, and that gives white, red/pink, and deep red ears. Just use the lighter colors for bread of pancakes and parch the darker ones.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 26, 2014 9:13:45 GMT -5
Yea, I never thought of that. I didn't waste a lot of time reading their stuff but I think it is like their other things where it is mostly for commercial growers that have to sign lots of agreements just to buy it. I think most people in my neighborhood, those few that still grow anything, are way to small scale to mess with that kind of stuff. Seminis does not sell to the home garden or retail seed trade at all. So yes, it is just big commercial growers who buy directly from the factor who are buying that seed. This does mean, however, that the sweet corn someone buys in the farmer's market could be GMO. I've been encouraging people to ask their market managers to require anyone who sells GMO sweet corn or other vegetables to say so, as this is certainly not what people go to farmer's markets for.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 26, 2014 9:05:58 GMT -5
Carol, sorry I'm not more up to speed on proper designations for the different genes, is EH the same thing as what I referred to as se? You're the one who is correct. se is the name of the gene. The first varieties released using it were called the Everlasting Heritage series, or EH. I suddenly slipped a few decades. It happens.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 14:41:04 GMT -5
Wow. That looks and sounds great! What fun!
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 14:38:03 GMT -5
The discussion on how different types are effected by crossing with sugar has me all excited. Carol, in your sugar/flint experiments, is the (sh) what has caused the problems? If so is it because it is just out there to some degree in most sweet corns? I thought it was mostly in some of the more modern sweet corns. How about (se) is it a problem also or do you think it would be OK in such a mix? The most recent context I can remember was wrinkled kernels cropping up early on in my breeding Cascade Ruby-Gold Flint. The Abenaki/Roy's Calais parent had some sweet contamination. When I planted a patch with just the wrinkled kernels, I got mixes of wrinkled and field on every ear, varying in proportions. Presumably I had planted both su and sh wrinkled kernels, so I got a mix of su, sh, and field type kernels. A mess. And I can't stand the flavor of sh corn, either. If you have just su or just sh you should be able to plant all the wrinkeled/shrunken kernels and get pure sweet corn. And the EH shouldn't interfere with that. It will change the flavor and rate of loss of sugar in the ears, but it won't combine with su or sh to give field corn.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 10:25:57 GMT -5
Technically there is another selection pressure I should be exerting, and will try to this upcoming year. Rice beans are still sufficiently unimproved that the have a fairly high incidence of hard seeds (around 1-2%) I've long since gotten into the habit of pre soaking all of them before planting. Not because they need it. In fact NOT soaking them would probably be better since it would mean that if I get the end of frost wrong (which with my weather I pretty much always do) the seed is still dry and better able to ride it out before better weather comes. It's mostly to avoid too many "sleeper" beans waiting it out for a year or two before coming up and messing up the color selections (I divide the crop by color but since which color gets which spot depends on how much I have of it at planting time which is where varies from year to year so older seed coming up can actually be a big problem in purifying the colors) Up till now any seed that was still hard I've then "helped" by scarifying it. But in retrospect, I probably should discard it, since all I am probably doing in ensuring that there will be hard seeds in the next generation. You don't necessarily need to eliminate the scarified seed. Just plant it at one end of the patch or row, save seed from it separately, and take your planting seed from the other lot. I'll admit that I would probably just discard (or eat) the recalcitrant seed to save myself having to deal with separate seed lots. I have enough seed lots already what with color selections for sister lines.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 10:12:29 GMT -5
Easier said than done. With the kind of chaotic temperatures we've had over the last few springs, there is usually only about a month or two when I can really count on the temperatures being conducive for growing things (the hyper cold weather has tended to linger on until the last week in June and then begin to pop up again by the middle of August) Everything either has to be really good at bearing extreme cold and heat at ANY point in it's growth (i.e. be able to basically go into stasis until things get more amenable, without actually dying due to freezing or withering from heatstroke) or be able to handle staying in a very small pot for up to a month and a half. Any plant with a reasonably vigorous root system gets rootbound by that. I'll level with you Carol, with my climate, and soil and other issues, pretty much all of my options are simply excuses and diversions to avoid the real solution; concede that my property is not designed to work for anything except lawn and stop trying in the first place, i.e. the sensible option I will never let myself accept. I figure if you can grow grass you can grow other things. Especially when you are passionate enough about it to transplant things like corn or beans. I started plant breeding on 3 tiny beds on a city lot in Corvallis. It's amazing what you can do if you want to enough. One of my friends lives in a deep woods and has about 2 or 3 hours of sun--just when the sun is directly overhead of his forest clearing. But he does have a greenhouse with more sun. He transplants everything. He even successfully grows Sweet Meat--Oregon Homestead, a full season squash. And this in spite of the fact that he gets several hundred pounds of SM-OH for free because he is a volunteer in my production seed growouts. Rats when made to work for food, will, if then given access to free food, eat only some of it. They continue working for some of the same food. I understand. And I think some of us have a drive to garden and maybe even create new crops bred right into our own genes. If your plants almost inevitably get pot-bound because of rotten unpermissive planting conditions, what to do? How about simply marking the plants that emerge and grow to optimal un-pot-bound planting size first by, for example, sticking a toothpick into the soil of their pots. Then plant those in one section or end of the row and save seed from them separately, and use only that lot for planting grade seed. They may perform worse than less pot-bound material that germinates or grows slower or has wimpy root systems. However, you'll not only avoid selecting for those characteristics, you'll be able to better tell what is going on in the situation.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 9:50:17 GMT -5
Carol: It's a joy to have you here. The idea that "There is only breeding" is a powerful thought to me. It gets to the heart of why I distrust the heirloom preservation movement so much... Nothing is static. Growing a variety is changing it in some way or other even if we don't see the change. Joseph is referring to a post I put in the "What does open-pollinated mean?" thread of the General Banter section. I'm going to repeat it here, as it is a special peeve of mine. I often get people saying they don't want to breed anything, they just want to maintain the heirlooms. Not possible. And it wouldn't be sensible even if possible. And it also just irritates me that people are willing to write off their own creativity and potential contribution and that of all their peers. Those who bred the heirlooms that have managed to survive to today had no such attitudes. It would be a bit like saying you only wanted to read classic books, not anything modern. That might be workable for fiction. But lots of luck learning any real science unless you read modern stuff. And what about news? Hundred year old news is about as useful as many heirlooms are. Some are still great, don't die at the slightest whiff of modern diseases, are competitive with modern varieties, and actually bear some resemblance to what they are supposed to be. Many, not so much. In many cases all that has been preserved is the name, which is now associated with junk; the real variety is long gone. Here's the post from the other thread: People often think of open pollinated varieties as being finished and stable. Actually they aren't. In order to maintain an open pollinated variety you have to constantly select for the desired characteristics and rogue out off types. Mutations are quite common. Every individual plant is likely to have dozens of them. Most don't matter, but some do. Most new mutations move the plant in the direction of being more like wild plants and less desirable as food plants for people. So if you just save seed from all your plants or a random subset of them, your variety will actually deteriorate quite rapidly. One reason why many heirlooms don't measure up compared with hybrids is because the creators of the hybrids are putting their best breeding efforts into maintaining the inbreds that go into their hybrids. Meanwhile, often nobody is properly maintaining the op, and soon, it is just a name that is being sold associated with junk that no longer resembles the original heirloom at all. There is really no such thing as "maintaining" a variety. There is only breeding. Either we breed to create something new with new characteristics. Or, if we like the characteristics in a variety, we must breed actively and select actively every generation in order to keep those characteristics.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Nov 24, 2014 9:19:56 GMT -5
I also want to select for white endosperm. I have always liked white sweet corn better than yellow and my Grand dad would only grow white corn, I don't know why. I also have this notion that it would be a visual cue to GMO contamination if yellow showed up. I don't know if that is really even true but its the best I'v got for my prejudice against yellow. It won't even be visible without dissection once I get Big Red's pericarp in there but nothing I can do about that. Your Grand dad was in good company. The traditional sweet corn of the pioneers was always white. 'Golden Bantam' was the first yellow sweet corn that attained real acceptance. The two colors are basically entirely different flavor classes. I like both, but if I had to choose I would go for white. As to the yellow being an indicator of GMO, that was true until recently, and still might be depending upon the possible source of contamination. Commercial GMO plantings were generally hybrid dent yellow field corns. So if you planted a white corn and screened out any yellows, you could keep out GMO contamination even if there was a field of it close enough to cause significant crossing. However, the GMOs were all field corns, so they would show up as field kernels on your sweet ears anyway. So until recently you did not really need to worry about GMO crosses into your sweet corn as long as you kernel-screened the ears chosen for planting grade before you shelled them. Unfortunately, Seminis has recently released a number of GMO sweet corns, both yellow and bicolor. They call them "Performance" corns. Here's a link to their Performance/GMO varieties www.seminis.com/global/us/products/Pages/Performance-Series-Sweet-Corn-Seed-Varieties.aspxSo if someone is growing one of those GMO bi-color sweets nearby, there isn't any trick you can use to screen out crossed up kernels. If someone is growing a corn patch anywhere close to where I'm growing mine, I just go and ask them what they're growing. I don't, by the way say anything like "You possibly evil crud, are you getting ready to contaminate my pristine crop with your foul GMO genes?" I just ask for the variety name in a casual way and the rough maturity time (making conversation). I don't ask about GMOs at all. But that's why I know the variety names of the GMOs or can look them up. This really only applies to keeping later corns, like 'True Gold' sweet, pure. 'Magic Manna' flour and 'Cascade Ruby-Gold flint are so early that about the only thing that crosses with them is Painted Mountain.
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