Grunt's Red Popcorn

[darwinslair]

So the year Grungy got sick, Grunt sent me a red seeded early popcorn project he had been working on. He crossed Red Strawberry in with full sized yellow cob popcorn, and was selecting to breed out the small strawberry ears, and the yellow years, replanting only the red seeds from larger ears.

I am still working on it. Have it mostly large ears, mostly red, and it is just under 90 days which is not too bad.

Anyway, it is pretty stuff.

Forum is not letting me upload a photo of it. Says forum has exceeded its alloted file space, but you can see photos of it at this blog posting.

threedaughtersfarm.com/wp/?p=3477

it is a ways down the post, and other photos there as well.

Tom

[steev]

That red popcorn is lovely; it looks to be full-size ears and large kernels (which wont blow out of the air-popper). Got seeds?

[tippler]

Looking good
I understand people liking unique looking things to grow. I'm the same way. If I can get a yellow, red, or purple green bean that is as good as a green version, I'll skip the green version every time. But not the point that its impractical. I've seen a lot of pictures of the strawberry and it looks really cool. But it doesn't look like you'd get much out of it. You'd probably need a dozen ears to get through a movie. hehehe

[samyaza]

Jan 5, 2014 23:03:18 GMT -5 darwinslair said:

...
Forum is not letting me upload a photo of it. Says forum has exceeded its alloted file space, but you can see photos of it at this blog posting.

threedaughtersfarm.com/wp/?p=3477
...

You meant this photo ?


What an amazing selection you did ! Red corn will never stop fascinating me.

I've never known Grungy in his lifetime but always spare a thought for him each time I bite into a Coastal Pride orange. My favorite type of tomato on a dwarf plant logically became my favorite dwarf. Definitively born from a brainwave.

[blueadzuki]

You think Stawberry looks like it has problems as a popcorn,Tippler, someday you should take a look at Chire's Baby, a red pocorn whos primary use is immature as "baby corn" (most baby corn is simply really really immature normal corn cobs, but there are a few strains that have been bred to keep the cobs tiny, mostly in order to get a lot more of them (most full size corns can make 1-3 or so ears per plant and most mini pops maybe 5-6; chires with is extreme tillering, can oftem make over 20) most catalogs mention that, should you let some get too old, so it is no longer tender, it can be used as popcorm. What they usually DON'T mention is that, because of it's uber tiny grains (each grain is about the size of a fat tomato seed, the popped grains you will get will be about the size of the little bits that break off the BOTTOM of normal popcorn.

[dustdevil]

Jan 5, 2014 23:03:18 GMT -5 darwinslair said:

So the year Grungy got sick, Grunt sent me a red seeded early popcorn project he had been working on. He crossed Red Strawberry in with full sized yellow cob popcorn, and was selecting to breed out the small strawberry ears, and the yellow years, replanting only the red seeds from larger ears.

I am still working on it. Have it mostly large ears, mostly red, and it is just under 90 days which is not too bad.

Anyway, it is pretty stuff.

Forum is not letting me upload a photo of it. Says forum has exceeded its alloted file space, but you can see photos of it at this blog posting.

threedaughtersfarm.com/wp/?p=3477

it is a ways down the post, and other photos there as well.

Tom

Hi Tom. How's the expansion rate and how's the taste?

[tippler]

blueadzuki, yea I've read quite a bit about chires baby. I had thought about doing with chires what this man is doing with strawberry(while simultaneously converting it from pop to sweet). If I ever play around with it, it'll be as mother plants though, and kept to a very small project. Because I suspect, the bigger the ears get, the less of them there will be. And having a gene to throw an ear at every node will likely end up a disaster. Its still a very fascinating corn that i'll likely play around with some day for the fun of it. I just look at a corn stalk and it seems like such an inefficient plant. To much green and not enough food. Even the cobs are mostly cob. I often wonder if once the big agro goal of uniformity is discarded, we couldn't raise the efficiency a bit. I'm also very interested in dwarf genes. I wonder what a sweet/dwarf/chires would look like.
That was one of my plans to start working on next summer, but I'm going to have to put that all on hold sense I'm not going to have the space I thought I was.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The reason that so much corn is grown is because it is extremely efficient at converting sunlight to food. On a dry weight basis it produces 4X more food per acre than beans or wheat and 3X more than potatoes.

I've grown many corn plants that produce a cob at 5 to 7 nodes on the plant, and on 3 to 7 stalks. Yes, they are somewhat smaller ears, but very respectable.

I have grown plenty of different varieties of dwarf corn. They produce small ears, but take up the same amount of field. They are often early corns, so they do not take advantage of the full growing season and miss a month or two of sunlight during warm days which could otherwise be converted to food.

I really like the productivity of popcorn in my garden because it is a very long season crop that takes advantage of every available frost free growing day.

[tippler]

I wasn't referring to amount of food per acre as much as the amount of food per fertilizer. They can be crammed together more than most plants their size, but look at the amount of corn vs the amount of green, produced. And the nitrogen requirements. I've read some articles about using dwarf genes to lighten fertilizer requirements, and they were already working on that. Your numbers still surprise me though. Mostly the potatoes. I thought potatoes would have taken the lead on weight at the end. Is that after the corn has been pulled off the cob as well, and without counting the green stuff even though it can be animal feed?

I'm in complete agreement on using the full season. I would shoot for something that uses the full season for sure. I'm more interesting in things for home gardens, than big fields. And nobody i know tries to squeeze another crop in before/after corn anyway, but I'm in MI, so we don't have a super long summer to begin with. Might as well use it all. Maybe dwarf genes combined with some longer season corn would do something. Like making a dwarf jala(extreme example). It might just even out and make regular looking corn though.

I saw a picture you posted of a crazy corn that had a ton of cobs on multiple stalks. It was out by itself. I think you said it was a volunteer. I liked that one for sure. Someone planting a few things in their back yard could plant a few of those nice and spaced out, and end up with quite a bit to munch on at the end.

[blueadzuki]

I actually once asked one of my agronomy teachers why, given that it had to be bred into it, most old time heirloom corn plants were so BIG. One would imagine that any benefit of favor one would get by the extra green material would be offset by all of that extra "leftover" stalk no to mention the difficulty in picking really really tall varieties where the cobs might be several feet over one's head (this was before I realized that 1. corn cobs usually don't come any higher than 1/2-3/4 up the plant so a 10 foot corn still has it's highest ear a comfortable to pick 5-7.5 feet up and 2. a Lot of really tall corns would be simply pushed or bent over before taking the cobs off. She explained that all that "extra" material really was only superfluous if you were only thinking of the ear as marketable, usable. The stalks were just as vauable, as animal fodded, as a source of fertilizer, as a sweet treat (long before we discovered corn syrup, the Native Americans would use corn stalks like sugar cane.) and so on.
That being said, I imagine that, in this modern era of single use crops, a lot of Big Ag breeders would LOVE to breed corn down smaller than it is (bearign in mind that modern corn is already pretty dwarfish compared to the "classic corn" since they want all the energy going into the ear. In fact, if they ever figure out how to juggle the genes to whatever they want, I imagine a lot of corn breeders (especially sweetcorn breeders) would love to come out with a corn that looked like the kind you see in some old cartoons, where the corn cob itself was what came out of the ground, perched on its stem end; the whole plant reduced to just a single cob and a tiny tassel to fertilize it (and if they re-inserted the trait for making tassels on the end of the cob, possible not even that).\
I can't comment on what a sweet chires would look like, but I have seen miniature sweetcorn kernels. I found some on an indian corn cob at a farmers market a few years ago (actually thnaks to that FM, I have mini cob versions of pretty much ALL the types of basic corn (as in not pod, and not waxy)(unfornately, not currently enough of any of them to share, however). The big impediment I can see in a sweet chires (no so much in breeding it as in getting anyone to want it as more than a curiosity) is the same one I would see in all of those. Most of the "good stuff" you want in a kernel is inside, and as size increases, surface area squares while volume cubes. That means that, for a given amount of corn, the smaller the individual kernels are, the higher the percentage of that weight is made up of the pericarps (skins) of those kernels, which are not digestible. So the net food value goes down (unless you need extra roughage in your system). A cob of a sweet chires would be mostly kernel skins, and hence probably not all that pleasant to eat.

[tippler]

First, sorry to the origonal poster for all the thread derailment. With that said, I knew I had read about this being done already with chires. It took a little hunting but I found it. Page 2, 7th post down the page. alanbishop.proboards.com/thread/3089/any-body-breeding-corn?page=2

"some years ago, i grew Chires corn, a multistalked, multieared popcorn originally sent to me by RoseMarie LaCherez with Double Red Sweet Corn, starting Chires early in a greenhouse 2 months before planting Double Red outside in the garden...
several years later after selecting for crinkle (sweet seeds), i had only sweet corns with an interesting population of multistalked, multieared corns with 6-14 5-6" ears... some of the ears had intense purple seeds, others had amber, orange, yellow and gold seeds...the seeds from plants with the most ears and the most beautiful colors were then planted, harvested and packed away for the following year but we didn't plant them, just tilled the ground and got several dozen volunteers with remarkable traits; one plant 9' tall had only one stalk with large ears in every leaf axil and carnelian colored seeds; there were many plants with 4-5 large stalks with 2-5 ears per plant, some with large ears and brilliantly colored seeds but no mixes of the seed colors on any ear...in addition there were a few plants with large popcorn-like seeds having coloration unlike anything previous...we will continue to explore and develop this interesting cross"

The bold sentence sounds interesting. If that plant had a dwarf gene mixed in, the corn/green ratio would probably be pretty impressive. If you got all that, and multi stalked, you'd really be in business. I'm going to message him or her and see if they're still working on this. The poster hasn't been online sense nov 2011. Hopefully they get email alerts about pms or something.
I've read a few posts where people intended to cross chires, and other random internet posts about it that weren't on this site. The problem people seem to have over and over again, is timing. Chires takes forever to tassel, so you'd want to plant a few seeds of the other kind every week for a very long time until you knew you got the cross.

[philagardener]

That description seems to have been posted by Alan Kapuler - a legend in the plant breeding world. His web site is peaceseedslive.blogspot.com/ and his 2014 list says he still can be reached at [e-mail] . Sounds really interesting!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Tippler: I calculated on a dry weight basis of actual food. I calculated the yield of "dehydrated" potatoes since the other crops are harvested dry.

I grow everything without fertilizer including corn. Then I till the stalks back into the garden: composting in place. Because the stalks are tilled back into the garden the only losses of nitrogen are due to the protein in the kernels. And the stalks produce a tremendous amount of organic matter for the soil. I never allow my corn stalks to be used for animal food.

I grow a lot of shorter season sweet corn in order to spread out the harvest so I can take corn to the farmer's market more often. I definitely am not able to double-crop the corn patches.

This fall I saved seed from one plant that I am calling a "corn bush". It had about 7 stalks of equal height and averaged 4 cobs per stalk. I shared seed widely. I'll be interested to see if it's offspring have a similar growth pattern.

Taller corn plants are less likely to suffer predation by animals. That might be sufficient reason to not grow dwarf corn plants.

[steev]

I've not got machinery big enough to till cornstalks directly back, or I would; instead, I throw the stalks into the tree-rows, with the rest of the slash, to provide nesting/habitat for native bees and such, and to mulch the trees while rotting. The slash-piles are piling pretty high this year, due to lack of rain, but it's just fluff which will collapse when it rains. I suppose it's a nice place for voles, but also for snakes; it's a jungle, in there.

I don't know about taller corn suffering less critter predation; I doubt raccoons (my most voracious corn predator) mind a bit of climbing or pulling-down in their pursuit of chow; they are worthy competitors, for sure.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Many of the cobs on these plants were 9 to 10 feet off the ground. It is much easier to talk about bending the plants than it was to actually bend them in the field. Corn plants this big resemble the strength of bamboo canes.