Tiny flour/dent corn

[blueadzuki]

I was wondering if anyone had ever heard of any "mini" corns that AREN'T popcorns. I ask because about 2 years ago while wandering around the farmer's market I found and bought a large quantity of very odd looking small cobs of Indian corn. All of the corn looked a little odd, being shorter and fatter than most mini-Indian corn I have encountered (almost strawberry corn shaped cobs though with ordinary "pearl" kernels as opposed to pointed kernels). Some had colors not normally found in the commercial mini corns (i.e. turquoise, pink, green, and "robins egg" pattern). A few to my surprise (which is why I am writing it) had some opaque kernels, which I at first thought were simply damaged (the corn was very badly infested with grain moths so I suspect it was already fairly old when I got it) but once I stripped it (with so much insect damage including some live ones I decided it was best to remove the good kernels if I wanted a chance of growing this corn myself next year), I realized were actual floury kernels. One cob was triple odd, it was dent, it had really thin "shoepeg" kernels, and it had 24 rows to the cob (bear in mind the ear we are talking about was only 4-5 cm in diameter!)(most normal big corn only has 8-12). Oh, and it was still multicolored. I was just wondering if anyone else had ever bumped into corn that was anything like what I described see pictures

Attachments:

[blueadzuki]

second picture

Attachments:

[blueadzuki]

please disregard first picture, I linked the wrong one (that one is of an ordinary sized dent not a mini)

Attachments:

[grunt]

In future, should you acquire insect infested cobs, just throw them in the freezer overnight. Anything that has hatched out is toast.

[blueadzuki]

That's is true, However in this case I was also trying to make sure that no already destroyed corn made it into the seed saving trays. corn that has already had its germ chewed out might be good for mulch, mut not much else. If 50% cor the kernels are so damaged (and on some of the cobs the numberers were much much higher) It mean that, if I get them out the "good" seed can be stored in 50% of the space (actually more if you subtract out the volume of the cob which if I was saving every seed I'd probably leave in place as I seem to recall reading that seed corn is best stored long term as whole ears and not shelled until planting time). Plus there was the incident where I froze some other infested corn that had gotten bean/flour weevils; some of the ones that hadn't hatched survived without my knowing and when I put the seed away they then hatched and not only at most of that corn, but got into a lot of my other samples and did big damage) and I really don't have the space to keep everything in the freezer perpetually, I'm not a professional seedbank.

[Alan]

Last fall I did see some "mini dent" corn on sale at the local grocery store, they were bundled with the normal mini flent kinds, I had every intention of buying some because it was "interesting" but I ultimately decided not to because I couldn't imagine for the life of me why or how I would grow it without getting it's genetics into some of my more important lines. No promises, but If I see it again this fall I will pick up some of it if anyone is interested as I know what farm it came from.

[blueadzuki]

The ironic thing is that, from a tecnical point of view "minature" grinding corn, however offbeat and interesting isnt all the useful practically. The laws of math say that as kernel size increases, the inner volume increases faster than the surface area. This measn that given equal weight, the smaller the kernels the more of that weight consists of the skins which are fiber and not much else. If you niximize before hand (which amogst other thing would remove the skins,) you'd still have a higer proportion of germ than normal (starch grows faster with size than germ) so the resulting meal would be quite oily.

[Alan]

My thoughts exactly blue. The only real use I can imagine for such a corn are for sale at high end farmers market to people with more money than brains! LOL, maybe that was mean, but probaly true.

Then again, you never know what kind of useful genes we might find in a variety like this and maybe even need one day!

[blueadzuki]

well a I said one of the cobs is basically a multcolored superowed shoepeg dent; cross it back with sweet a few generations (make a sweet but with all of the current ones other odd traits) you might have and interesting thing for people who want corn on the cob as a finger food, or want really tiny corn "niblets" (hey if someone made a market for petit pois why not petit mais?)

[blueadzuki]

here is the kernel box for these minicorns
from top to bottom the rows are flour, flour, flint, dent

Attachments: