|
Post by steev on May 9, 2013 21:58:27 GMT -5
That's lovely.
I've got your Cherokee popcorn cooking, as well as several others of your landraces. It will be a couple of yours direct-seeded this year; one hopes for enough the eat, being admittedly a tad anal about seed.
|
|
|
Post by davida on May 10, 2013 18:25:37 GMT -5
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say "Too small to grind profitably". Thanks for the excellent explanation. That makes sense.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on May 10, 2013 19:03:26 GMT -5
Picture of the corn as it stands now. Actually that brings up something I was meaning to ask you people. As you can see the corn is really really crowded in the pot it is in (I didn't want to plant it in a pot, but that was literally the ONLY way I was able to keep the squirrels from eating it as soon as it was in the ground (they ate 10 pounds of planted corn seed literally overnight. In a week or so, when they have grown enough for it to be safe to do so, I am planning to put them into the ground to finish up ("safe to do so in this case means "mature enough they have used up all of their stored food, and hence no longer have any parts the squirrels will be interested in"). My question is as follows; in your opinion, what method of planting will result in the least number of plants dying. Should I try and tease the corn seedlngs apart and plant them individually? should I try and chop the pot soil up into chunks or should I just put it in as is, and hope the ones on the edges grow mostly out rather than in. Keeping any of it in the pot is a no-go; I know it is too small to hold the root system of even ONE mature corn plant. Plus since these are mini cobs, I have a nagging suspicion these corn plants will tiller a LOT.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 10, 2013 23:34:06 GMT -5
blueadzuki: I routinely transplant corn that's about that size... I have two methods depending on which project I'm working on.
For the market crop, if I experience poor germination, I'll dig up plants with a shovel, a scoop at a time, and transplant it with soil and all. I do that in hot (for me) weather. They do fine 1 to 2 weeks older than what you have there.
Last spring I had a malfunction with my seeder (clogged it with dirt). About 8-10 plants all went into the soil as a group. Each seed produced one cob, and zero tillers.
For Frosty, I dig the plants and remove all dirt from the roots to insure that I am not transplanting non-germinated seeds. I am interested in transplanting only the plants that germinate first in cold weather. They also transplant fine. The weather is colder.
Neither of these transplantings get watered after moving, since the irrigation system is not active at that time of year. I'd prefer to water, but they do fine with the residual soil moisture.
|
|
|
Post by steev on May 10, 2013 23:59:02 GMT -5
Depends on the potting soil. Best case is it's loose enough to knock out the clump, squish it a little (from the sides) to loosen things up, and start pulling it apart (by halves, then quarters, etc.). With luck, you can winkle out individual plants, without damaging the roots unduly; be ready to plant them as you go, so as not to dry them out. It's mostly best if the soil isn't too soggy (in the pot) when you do this, as that helps unattached particles fall away.
Planting out smaller clumps is better than larger ones, if it comes to that.
I plant out clumps (mostly of three), grown so, when they're 2-3", along my drip lines, water them once planted, and mostly have no problems except needing to hill up the occasional flopper.
This year several of the varieties that interest me have enough seed that I'll direct seed, much less fiddling, but I've got at least a dozen in the ground or coming along by this method. It works very well, but it's too laborious for anything but seed-increase or a hobby-plot.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 22, 2013 18:00:45 GMT -5
Yesterday I planted the orangest kernel's from bjargakarlinn's [Cateto + Coastal Tropical Flint Composite] which I had selected because I thought that they might produce offspring that would pop well. I'm intending to eventually incorporate them into my popcorn, but I'll do it through selection instead of through immediate crossing. In the next row over I am making successive plantings of Ashworth sweet corn which I intend to detassel so that I can move that gorgeous deep orange color into my sweet corn. Doing it this way will allow me to maintain bjargakarlinn's corn as a pure strain.
About a week ago I planted several of bjargakarlinn's composites of Andean corns. I put them in the next row over from Dave Christensen's "Eagle Meets Condor" which is half high altitude Andean corn, and another of Dave's corns with ancestors that include high altitude Mexican corn.
I stuck a row of LISP Ashworth sweet corn into the patch, and I'm doing successive plantings. I intend to detassel the Ashworth, so that I can incorporate the Andean corn genome into my sweet corn.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on May 22, 2013 19:31:03 GMT -5
My corn was transplanted into the actual garden yesterday. I planted in in clumps of 5 which in restrospective was probably a bit larger than I should have gone with as I only filled half the garden due to ludicrosly overestimating how many seedlings I had (It turns out my orignal esitmate of "about 100" was pretty close there were 105. Since my garden is somewhere between 7'X7' and 10'X10' (depending on how much the outside vegitation and tree roots have encroached since the last year) That means I really should have planted them 1 by one or 2 by two. Oh well, a lot probably got too mangled to make it anyway so at least 5 will cut down on the holes in the grid. And I can use the extra space to plant those giant peanuts I got (BTW that reminds me, since I'll have to do it for the peanuts anyway, how does corn in general like land plaster?)
|
|
|
Post by steev on May 22, 2013 20:23:43 GMT -5
Land plaster?
Given that 5 might make a crowded clump, nutrients-and-water-wise, you may want to triage the runts of each clump as it becomes obvious which are lagging.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on May 23, 2013 7:08:57 GMT -5
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/land%20plasterGiven that 5 might make a crowded clump, nutrients-and-water-wise, you may want to triage the runts of each clump as it becomes obvious which are lagging. They're probaby going to do that by themselves intially. When I put them in, I put ALL the sprouts in, even those that had lost all of thier roots along with the bottom of the stem. Those are basically guaranteed to die and will be removed then. When that happens and the animals have given up doing whatever they do (when I went out yesterday there were a fair number of seedlings laying on thier sides with the holes they belonged in next to them, but whether this was from animals looking for bugs in the freshly turned soil (there's no stored food left in the seedlings so the one's that eat those CAN'T be resposible) or badly rooted plants that toppled over when I turned the tub of water I had used to seperate the plants over (to keep the water from going to waste) I don't know). After that, I probably will thin each clump down to 1-2 plants. Though I may try and re-root any pull ups that aren't out and out dead further forward; as it stands now I only have about half what one is supposed to plant for corn (isn't the rule 200 if you want to keep a variety going) and am loathe to drop the number down further any more than I have to. Plus it could use another row forward, I made it short in the worst direction (there are 21 clumps 7 across three rows. Unforuntely the direction of the rows is perpendicular to the one the wind blows best from, so unless I want to rely soley on my ability to hand pollinate I better hope we have a lot of very mild breezes (hard winds will probably blow all the pollen over the corn and have it land in the driveway like three years ago.
|
|
|
Post by steev on May 24, 2013 22:54:35 GMT -5
Unlike us, many plants are remarkably tenacious of life and will overcome far more grievous physical insults with a little aid. Could they but drive, they might have driven us to the wall; given how we use them, they might have been justified in doing so.
Further, a genetic bottleneck beats the hell out of extinction; I would be amazed if there were no-one who could help puff up your genetic base, should that be needed.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on May 28, 2013 10:16:36 GMT -5
UPDATE This weekend, I hot to go out and re-plant pretty much all the corn; the three day constant rainstorm basically knocked the stuff out of the ground like skittles before the ball. The one good point of this is that it did allow me to both thin the groups and add a new row. Once I removed the hopeless cases (those animas had chewed all the roots off, those where they had chewed off everything except the roots and a fair number so think and soft they basically turned to mush in my hands I had 30 left (out of an original 105) Using the largest plant as a reference (which is also basically the only one that managed to stay upright I re set a grid of 6x5 planted singly (as long as I was resetting everthing I also eliminated the outermost column of plants, as I realized that with seven, the garden was planted edge to edge, and I had nowere to step down the road when I will need to get in between the corn to water, pollinate and harvest it.) I don't know how well it will take (at the moment the plant that stayed up on it's own is the only one that looks at all "healthy") and we are slated for another 2-3 day downpour starting today (which could easily knock them all back out of the ground) but we will have to see.
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Aug 3, 2013 1:22:53 GMT -5
Today I was out standing in the popcorn patch. And they are only now starting to tassel. Oh my.
|
|
|
Post by steev on Aug 4, 2013 21:27:19 GMT -5
Outstanding in the corn patch, indeed.
I'll note that your corn is much more robust than mine, which I'll attribute to depleted soil and limited water, for the time being; I'm working on both those limitations, but it's slow going, working only week-ends with small toolage.
|
|
|
Post by aineo on Sept 16, 2013 9:30:17 GMT -5
Joseph, I might have missed it, but I don't see where you explain how you determine the expansion. Would you mind sharing your technique?
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 16, 2013 10:33:41 GMT -5
Joseph, I might have missed it, but I don't see where you explain how you determine the expansion. Would you mind sharing your technique? The procedure I like best is: Pick off 15 mL (1 Tablespoon) of kernels from the cob. (That's about 2 rows from butt to tip). Pop in the microwave in a glass dish with a glass plate on top. Takes about 2 to 3 minutes. I listen and stop the oven when it's about 5 seconds between pops. The first batch pops different than later batches, so I typically pop a batch to warm up the dishes and the oven. Measure in a graduated glass measuring cup. 400 ml is a typical yield, so 400/15 = 27X expansion.
|
|