Astronomy Domine

[nathan125]

joseph and his technicolor sweet corn.
ha

would you happen to have some AD seed left for a man with the urge to try it, perhaps we can barter?we have a similar location. sW idaho/oregon/nevada border. arid and dry.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I have gallons of Astronomy Domine seed to share: Only about 1/2 gallon left of the super-special technicolor blend though. Send me a personal message with your mailing address and suggested swaps. That's pretty desolate country. Hope you have some irrigation!

I'm expecting that I'll be more capable next year of identifying and growing the colors separately. I learned a lot about corn kernel structure and coloring this year.

Somehow I missed separating out a batch of cobs that are super-yellow. Oops. That would have been so easy!

Perhaps by next year I'll have the cherry flavored corn isolated and stabilized enough to add it to the technicolor blend. I'm also planning on isolating the different anther/tassel color schemes, so that each of those combos will be included in each outgoing sample. I marked interesting tassels this year, but after the anthers fell off, it was game over. Some of the purple/yellow combinations would look really clever if they represented more of the patch.

There is that really clever blue pericarp in the glass gem popcorn. Gotta pull that into Astronomy Domine one of these years. Might could do that at the same time that I am making a shorter season popcorn. I'm thinking that I'll incorporate glass gem into my popcorn at the same time I cross it onto my 60 day sweet corn. That does three projects at once: Incorporates glass gem into my long season popcorn, followed by segregating the cross into a short season popcorn, and into a sweet corn with a light blue pericarp. I see some spiffy red aleurone in the popcorn. Have to keep an eye out for that in the descendents of the cross. I want to use sweet corn for the cross, because it seems like it would be easier to segregate back into popcorn than flour corns are.

Light purple and kew red lavender kernels are floating around in my gene pools. I might have to grab the light purple out of Darrell's Cherokee Squaw cross. The kew red seems trickier. Here's what the Cherokee Squaw looks like. Right now it's too long season to be incorporated into Astronomy Domine. But give me a few years and I'll get that resolved.



As an experiment, I took a cob of Astronomy Domine sweet corn, and saved kernels from the middle of the cob, from the tip, and from the but. I'm going to plant them group-to-row to see how much variation there is in days to maturity between the groups.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I started picking the Astronomy Domine seed crop today.


I also planted like colors in semi-isolated patches. They are currently silking. If the fall frosts cooperate I may get to harvest them as well.

One of the people that received Astronomy Domine cut some off the cob and froze it last fall. She was very dismayed a few days ago when she opened the package and it had molded in storage. Until she remembered that colored kernels had went into the freezer.

The timing of the cross between 60 day sweet corn (LISP Ashworth) and my landrace popcorn seems to have worked out well. Looking forward to attempting to segregate out a shorter season popcorn.

Still too early to tell if the timing will work out for the oaxacan cross with Ashworth. The Oaxacan corn has not started tasseling yet even though it was planted on the east side of a building.

[mnjrutherford]

Mine didn't do well at all this year. But I attribute that to insufficient mulch.

[bonsaioutlaw]

Hey Joseph, what does this mean? "Until she remembered that colored kernels had went into the freezer."

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Sept 18, 2012 13:45:42 GMT -5 bonsaioutlaw said:

Hey Joseph, what does this mean? "Until she remembered that colored kernels had went into the freezer."

This is what went into the freezer. But she was expecting plain old yellow grocery store sweet corn to come out, so she thought that the corn had molded in storage...

[bonsaioutlaw]

How does AD taste after if has been frozen?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Sept 18, 2012 14:25:49 GMT -5 bonsaioutlaw said:

How does AD taste after if has been frozen?

Like NK199 or Golden Bantam, but with more flavors.

[steev]

That black-cap in the lower-left of your photo is very attractive.

[Andre]

I have a few questions about AD.

1 / A population is generally made of individuals having common genetic (same phenotype - every plant and ears looks almost similar, same GDD, same resistance characteristics, etc...). Do you consider that AD is already a population or just a genepool since all the ears looks so different ?

2 / It usually takes 7 generations to stabilize a population (97% of the genetic is then common to all individuals) except if you use the double haploïds technique (that reduce the process to 3 or 4 years) so how can we consider that AD is a "population" after only 4 or 5 years ?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I don't know the botanical definition of population... The way that I use the word is to mean all of the plants that are growing together in a landrace, whether or not they share a common ancestor. In other-words, the common-sense meaning of the word, regardless of the jargon that might apply to it in some academic setting somewhere. I likewise don't know the botanical definition of genepool. To me it means the collection of all the alleles in a population. The word "clade" means a group consisting of an ancestor and all of it's descendants.

I am only growing one pure clade. That is my red-podded pea project. Every pea in the population is descended from the same mother and father.


I do not require the plants in my populations or my genepools to be pure-clades, or stable, or to have the same phenotype, or the same GDD, or the same disease resistance characteristics.

There are some Astronomy Domine traits that are relatively fixed in my garden. For example, they are all sweet corn. There are no popcorns, or flour corns, or flint corns. They have around 16 rows of kernels +/- 2 rows. I aim for about 30% sugary enhanced. I have selected for shorter days to maturity than the original version, so my DTM is about 820 to 950 GDD:10C. A relatively narrow harvest window of about 10 days. So there are no extra-early or extra-late maturing individuals, just a middle of the road phenotype for maturity. And stable from year to year. I don't consider color to be a phenotype trait that should be fixed. Plants grow from 5 to 7 feet tall. Again, a nice center of the bell curve distribution for sweet corn in my climate. All of my corn is immune to the corn diseases that are common in my area. (I don't know if there are any, but if there are, they are immune.) So a consistent phenotype in my garden, but not necessarily consistent in other gardens with different climates, soils, and diseases. Anther color can be yellow or purple on a yellow or purple tassel. So there are 4 different tassel configurations. It would make a gorgeous decorative corn if I took the time to select for the different combinations and semi-stabilized them for that trait.

I am not interested in inbreeding Astronomy Domine. It is a creole landrace, not a cultivar. Plants in the population are related "by-marriage", more than "by-ancestry". So it's a population of cousins-in-law. Sometimes it's obvious looking at two plants that they are from the same clade. I introduce new genetics into the population/genepool whenever I find something that I want to include. I'm currently growing somewhere around the 8th generation. Hard to count since there is a constant influx of new material.

I grow semi-isolated patches of Astronomy Domine. So I grow a patch of white cobs, and a patch of yellow cobs, and a patch of orange cobs, and a patch of gray cobs, and a patch of lavender cobs, and a patch of red cobs. I also grow a large patch of bulk seed of whatever color. That allows me to mix the seed before sharing so that the widest possible combination of kernel colors is grown. I say semi-isolated because the patches are only separated from each other by about 4 feet. So the cob is most likely to be pollinated by another corn with a similar colored kernel, but it might not be.

[Andre]

OK now reading this I understand better. I would say that landraces are a kind of "evolutive broad spectrum cultivars".

It's just a concept I'm not used to but it seems to work fine ! 

The only problem is that landraces are more difficult to transmit to someone with a different soil or climate.

Every body should create his own landraces but this requires skills and time. I guess that's why cultivars have been created.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jul 9, 2013 18:24:56 GMT -5 Andre said:

The only problem is that landraces are more difficult to transmit to someone with a different soil or climate.

Every body should create his own landraces but this requires skills and time. I guess that's why cultivars have been created.

I would say that landraces are easier than cultivars to move to different gardens with different conditions. Because the wide genetic diversity allows them to adapt to their new home. My neighbors often buy seeds that were grown in damp rainy overcast Oregon. Then they wonder why the plants burn up in our arid brilliantly sunlit desert.

The advantage of cultivars is that they are near clones of each other, so they can be grown as cogs in an agricultural machine... They ripen on the same day, they are the same size and shape, so they fit exactly into the spot they were pre-programmed to fit in the shipping crate, etc... Cultivars are equivalent to a production line in a factory. Landraces are like human-scale hand-crafts. I prefer landraces because the only machines I have in my garden are for weeding. I don't have any machines to help with harvesting, so it doesn't matter if the fruits are different sizes or colors or ripen at different times.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Today is my favorite gardening day of the year... The exact date varies from year to year, but the activity of my favorite day is always the same: It is the day I go through the Astronomy Domine sweet corn patch and mark which plants I am going to save for seed. [Thanks Alan, Johno, and other contributors!] I opened hundreds of cobs to peek at them and see whether they have great color at the fresh eating stage. I examined thousands of plants looking for those that grow best on my farm and contain traits I value. I hung bright colored ribbons of various colors on the stalks that I want to save seed from. (I imagine that any garden fairies were dancing in glee at all the bright flutters, and any field trolls were sulking that "There goes the neighborhood". No worries, there are plenty of dank weed patches for them to hide in.)

Then I filled my truck with seconds to take to the farmer's market. The usual dilemma of a gentleman plant breeder. The best of the best never leaves my farm, only seconds. The Astronomy Domine that I am taking to market is fabulous corn!!! Robust flavor. Not too sweet. Glorious colors. My proudest crop of the year (along with cantaloupe which I harvested 1/2 bushel of today. All for seed, but I'll take melons next week.) I took lots of photos. Too tired to post any for a few days. Market day tomorrow. That helper I was bragging up the other week has been unreliable, more than a little: So I'll get along without.

I only picked 4 cobs that I really really wanted to save for seed. Ooops. Perhaps I'll find a few sister cobs later on that are like the ones I accidentally picked.

I boiled up corn for supper. I found one cob (alas only after cooking it) that retained a bright red color after cooking in water. I cooked corn in plain water, and with baking soda or vinegar. I was testing to see which retained the colors best. I recommend adding a tablespoon of vinegar to the water for best color retention. Whites stay whiter, red becomes more red, blue and pink retain their colors rather than turning gray.

Adding a teaspoon of baking soda to the water turned white kernels to yellow, and made yellow kernels even more yellow. It turned reds and pinks to black or gray, and blues to green.

I'm so content today, and so tired. Got the grapes picked.

Steev: Sorry for complaining about my commute. Thanks for helping me to keep things in perspective. For what it's worth, my large field is being sold. The new owners are honoring the vegetables until the end of the growing season, but it will be unavailable to me next growing season. So it appears that I will be farmless right after our fall frosts. Guess that I get to make decisions about what I want to do with my life when I grow up.

[steev]

Aww, so sorry to hear you've lost your large field; sad to hear of a farmer without enough land to keep him bushed.

Your post about landraces, clades, et al, leads me to think of the difference between kith and kin: in-laws and blood. Being Mormonesque, I'm sure you get my drift; I do enjoy geneology.

If I may be of any help to your breeding work, given constraints of climate and irrigation, feel free to discuss; I admit to no expertise.

Sorry to hear about your helper; in my experience, that is the rule, not the likely outcome.