Seriously, sweet and tender in OP?

[littleminnie]

I am still dreaming of getting to plant corn. The fields next to me will be potatoes this season and possibly soy beans next so I could grow an OP variety. I like tender corn and to sell it I would hope to have it sweet when the customer eats it. So I am suspicious of OP types. The only corn I have grown myself was Ambrosia. Any OP worthy of market sales?

[canadamike]

Yes, there are many, depending on what you want. White or yellow? The true golden bantam is good, so are many others. But for market, stay with your hybrids while you evaluate the others. Many delicious old corns are white ..like Oregon Evergreen, Luther Hill...

[littleminnie]

Another thing I wonder is this rule to not plant sh2 and se or su together. How can planting something near another type matter in the growing year? Why would corn be like that and not any other vegetable? You hear people talk about their veggie cross pollinating and then you explain they cannot in the growing year, only for seed saving. So why is sh2 corn different? It is something I have been wondering about.

BTW I prefer bicolor corn. But I just need to be excited about the corn to sell it and need to plant what other people want not myself- if I get to grow it this year. My main reason for wanting to is at market the customers come for corn and go to a stand with corn and then buy whatever else there too; then they walk by my stand and see my stuff and say they just bought everything from the stand with corn.

On my Grandma's 200 acre sweet corn farm when I was a kid she grew Sugar Loaf and Sugar King. I remember the names and the taste! We had corn eating contests at dinner. ;D

[DarJones]

With most fruits and vegetables, you eat either the leaves, or the ovule which surrounds the seed. This is tissue formed by the parent plant and is not changed as a result of pollination. Turnip greens and tomatoes fit these groups. With corn, you are eating the seed and seed get pollinated. So the seed of the corn is formed from tissue that includes the pollen and whatever genetic package it carries. If your sweet corn is pollinated by field corn, then it is no longer pure sweet corn, now it is field corn which is dominant for many traits including starch formation which means much much less sugar in the kernel.


Lesson to learn is that when you consume seed, you MUST consider where the pollen came from.

DarJones

[castanea]

Mar 12, 2010 21:56:10 GMT -5 littleminnie said:

Another thing I wonder is this rule to not plant sh2 and se or su together. How can planting something near another type matter in the growing year? Why would corn be like that and not any other vegetable? You hear people talk about their veggie cross pollinating and then you explain they cannot in the growing year, only for seed saving. So why is sh2 corn different? It is something I have been wondering about.

I don't know the answer to your question, but corn is not a vegetable. It's a grain. I suspect the answer is related to the nature of grain pollination.

[castanea]

Mar 13, 2010 11:39:18 GMT -5 DarJones said:

With most fruits and vegetables, you eat either the leaves, or the ovule which surrounds the seed. This is tissue formed by the parent plant and is not changed as a result of pollination. Turnip greens and tomatoes fit these groups. With corn, you are eating the seed and seed get pollinated. So the seed of the corn is formed from tissue that includes the pollen and whatever genetic package it carries. If your sweet corn is pollinated by field corn, then it is no longer pure sweet corn, now it is field corn which is dominant for many traits including starch formation which means much much less sugar in the kernel.


Lesson to learn is that when you consume seed, you MUST consider where the pollen came from.

DarJones

It's more complicated than that. With most nuts, pollination has no effect on the composition of nutrients in the nut, which is the seed.

On the other hand, pollination does change the composition of some true fruits such as some persimmons.

You have to evaluate every plant or species of plant on its own merits.

[canadamike]

Corn is a bit more complex than other things because pollination happens at2 levels, it is double in a way. The germ is a diploid that has its own pollination, and the endosperm is a tripoid that is also pollinated.

Anyway, it is a species that is highly variable and what pollinates what can change everything. It is all related to the nature of the sugars in the endosperm. Starch does not taste like sucrose or glucose...all 3 are sugars. Sh2 or su or se, these genes are recessive, meaning you need the genes from both parents to keep the corn sweet

Since Sh2 is not on the same gene than su or se, it is not the same kind of sweet so to say,if one pollinates the other,you end up with each recessive gene being taken over by the dominant of the other corn, which means field corn as a result.

Each gene needs to meet its recessive match, and it does not happen, the su gene meets a field corn partner, since the sweetness of the Sh2 is elsewhere on the chromosome. Same thing happens to the Sh2..

[Alan]

As far as a good straight up open pollinated sweet goes Stowells and Art Verrel are the best in my opinion.

[littleminnie]

I think I have worked out a way to grow sweet corn this season. I really wanted to have it available to the CSA customers and ideally market too but I probably won't have enough for market.
I am going to do a '2 sisters' method and plant a chunk of corn down the center of the vining cucurbit areas and plant melons/squash/pumpkins along the edge every few feet. I will have black plastic on the outside for the cucurbits to grow on. I just have to make sure I have a wide enough chunk in the middle for the corn to pollinate itself. There will be 4 sections of these corn areas wrapped in melons/squash but each one will only be about 4 feet wide to allow for watering with soakers. The four chunks will equal 190 linear feet in 65', two 45' and one 35' chunks. At four feet wide this equals 760 sq feet. There will be six feet of black plastic between the areas (just 3 feet on the outside edge so the vines can sprawl on the edging weeds) which is hopefully enough room.
I plan on putting down and discing in a few loads of manure for fertilizer and am thinking about corn gluten after the seeds germinate for a little weed and nitrogen help.
So my concerns with this plan are:
getting enough water through the soaker hoses to cover the areas
having wide enough corn areas to pollinate
having enough spaces to get into the corn for picking (plan to make pass-throughs here and there through the corn)
weeding the corn
choosing the variety (I am still suspicious of the OP varieties being inferior in taste and holding quality)
planting the seed without killing my back like last time
deciding how many rows/how close together to plant the corn (I'd like to make the rows less than 1' apart and the corn in the row a foot apart)

Thoughts?

[grunt]

With strips of corn 4' wide, you should have no trouble with pollination. I plant all of mine in the beds I have, which are only 44" wide, edge to edge, and get great pollination rates. Like everything else I grow here, I crowd it a bit when I plant, a habit I got into from mot having enough garden space to "properly" grow everything I wanted. I've tried to spread things out, to see what stuff is "supposed" to grow like, but still haven't managed to get tomatoes planted more than 18" apart in the row.
I water everything here with individual emitter drip lines, including my orchard. figure out how many gallons an hour your soaker hose delivers, and go by that. If you can mulch everything, it will cut down on the amount you have to water, by up to 2/3rds

[littleminnie]

Thanks. Glad to hear you agree 4' will just do it.
I crowd a lot of stuff too from growing in a 22x22 area for 8 years. Now with more room I have found it difficult to get that happy medium. I like my tomatoes 3' apart but other things I like to do a staggered row planting and really cram them in. I calculated this would allow me to plant 290 brassica plants, 168 peppers and 385 potato hills!

[mnjrutherford]

I SURE don't know what to expect from this corn. But it's seed from what was grown last year. A blend of Silver AND Golden Queen with a bit of Country Gentleman thrown in for good measure. Our neighbor told us not to bother saving seed as it wouldn't come up. I think he was either misinformed or pulling my leg.



Of course just because it's sprouting doesn't mean it will either grow OR be any good. Time will answer both those questions.

You can view the entire photo album here: trulythankful.typepad.com/photos/2010_garden_photos/dscn1945.html

[mortality]

Some beautiful pictures there mnjrutherford, plants to be truely proud of !

[mnjrutherford]

Thanks Mortality! ;D I sure hope they all live up to my boys appetites!