Questions about GMO, Corn Genetics and some Corn Pictures

[reed]

There is little reason to even consider wind here other than maybe trying to have lager isolation distances, which unfortunately I can't really do. A general rule might, stress might, be that wind it is predominately west to east or south to north but on any given day it can vary from dead still, to light breeze, to gusty, to tornado and from any direction. It is possible there could be a stretch of calm during flowering but nothing that you could really plan for. Still anything I want to minimize crossing on will be at the west south/west part of the patch.

I am surrounded by heavy woods and the old house whose yard is now my corn patch is still there just to the west so I'll have a little protection from it but lodging is still a concern. We can easily get gusts of 50 mph and more in a normal storm let alone a bad one.

The discussion on how different types are effected by crossing with sugar has me all excited. Carol, in your sugar/flint experiments, is the (sh) what has caused the problems? If so is it because it is just out there to some degree in most sweet corns? I thought it was mostly in some of the more modern sweet corns. How about (se) is it a problem also or do you think it would be OK in such a mix?

I also want to select for white endosperm. I have always liked white sweet corn better than yellow and my Grand dad would only grow white corn, I don't know why. I also have this notion that it would be a visual cue to GMO contamination if yellow showed up. I don't know if that is really even true but its the best I'v got for my prejudice against yellow. It won't even be visible without dissection once I get Big Red's pericarp in there but nothing I can do about that.

[blueadzuki]

Nov 21, 2014 19:10:08 GMT -5 Carol Deppe said:

If you transplant a variety that has big vigorous roots, you not only are no longer selecting for ability to germinate and grow outdoors in real soil and weather, but you may also be selecting for slower germination or wimpy root systems. (The fast germinating seeds with big root systems are more likely to overgrow the pot or have their roots damaged in transplanting.) My corn, beans, and squash varieties are always direct seeded, and they germinate fast and have extremely aggressive roots. It's quite possible if you transplant that a variety that puts out a more restrained root system might be better for you. Full bush squash varieties normally don't even survive under my growing conditions because they have restricted bush root systems that don't get down to moist soil fast enough to survive on my regime of little or no watering in spring. But such varieties would undoubtedly have root systems more amenable to being potted and transplanted. I think a concept of whether the variety is to be direct seeded or transplanted needs to be a basic part of the definition of the variety. (All my corn, beans, and squash are designed for direct seeding.)

I suppose I am technically skewing for small root systems and slower germination as well in my beans; simply because I have no other choice.

In my garden with my critter problem there are basically four ways I can (kind of) get a successful result from any legume (given my garden's definition of "successful" means "getting any seed back AT ALL")

1. Overplant MASSIVELY, and count on there being enough seed germinating that some of them manage to make it to the "safe" age (the point where the critters no longer have any interest in the plants because they have used up all their stored food and/or the season has finally provided wild plants to supplement their diet so they cut down on their attacks). This works OK at the moment for things like the rice beans where I CAN plant a handful of seed for every plant I hope to get out. But it does make planning a bit tough (since you don't control which plants make it you wind up with little snarls of plants growing too close together for their own good too intertwined to separate with huge dead zones in between and are left with the choice of leaving things as they are and risking what is there strangling each other, or thinning them heavily and tossing out 19 out of every 20 of what little you still have. And it really isn't a long term solution since I only get back about 10% of the amount of seed I put in. If the types of beans I am looking for go out of the commercial run (and based on what I am seeing I think they are) I probably have one year's worth of planting before I hit the danger zone (where the amount that goes in is small enough the critters can and will eat ALL of it before any grows. And the plant doesn't always work anyway (I planted around five to ten POUNDS of a certain cowpea last season and not one made it past seedling.)

2. Plant in a pot and keep the pot on a pedestal or somewhere else out reach. That works for keeping the critters out, but I have only so many such spots. And a lot of legumes do not do well with that kind of a restricted root space.

3. Delay planting until the animals reduce their attacks due to the season (same season as in 1). This I do mostly for things like the odd adzukis I grow (where my seed supply is rather limited to begin with) I put them in the same rough area as the rice beans but almost a month LATER, after the rice beans are already well established plants (in terms of weather requirements the two could and should go in at the exact same time). It works for keeping the animals down (usually) but since a lot of the stuff is on the fence with making mature seed before the frost anyway (I'm still working on selecting for shorter season material) cutting out a big chunk of the potential growing season is not always a good idea. It's rare I can get any more than the first few pods through.

4. Start the plants indoors keep them there until they enter the "safe zone" then transplant them. This usually works well but, as you said, I am probably selecting for plants that are a bit slow in the maturing department (not a good thing when you are working with a plant where you are trying to get a shorter time until maturity.


Ironically (given your corn comments) I usually end up sort of doing a reverse of that with the rice beans. At around the 6 in mark I go through and pull out all of the plants that are the MOST robust, with the biggest leaves and that are already starting to twine. This seems counter intuitive, given I am trying for a faster maturing and more vigorous strain. But I have learned that the plants that mature that fast usually never get any farther; they put so much effort into leaf production they never get around to making any flowers within the time frame allotted (i.e. they are the longer season ones I am trying to rogue out) The fertile ones invariably will get to at least 8in before sending out any tendrils (and on rare occasions I bump into a true bush one that NEVER makes tendrils and instead branches and flowers [this may be important since, based on what literature I have read a true bush form rice bean is not officially recognized, ALL the known selections are climbers])

I've had quite a lot of albino corn shoots too (though since mine occurred in a red stalked corn they came out pink, not yellow (I'd actually consider the color ivory, but yellow works too. I'm assuming you mean a color like where you'd think they were dead dry straw until you touched them and found them wet and alive) I think it may just happen to some corn seeds with age (in my case it was some Andean that was probably several years old.)

[reed]

I do everything direct planted except tomatoes, peppers and cabbage family things and am trying to get away from even those. I have noticed volunteer tomatoes seem not to get diseased as badly and often produce better. I want lots of tomatoes to put in jars for winter, someone else can have bragging rights to "first of the season". Volunteer peppers are a little later than transplants put produce just fine or even better. Volunteer marigolds leave transplants way behind, I rarely save their seeds any more unless a really cool one shows up. Dill has basically turned into a weed and I love it. Volunteer sun flowers come up when mornings are still freezing, I always thought they were hot weather things. Starting this year I'll never discard another volunteer squash, or melon or anything else, at least until I see what it does and how it tastes.

There is something I don't quite understand though. Whey I try to plant, say sun flowers or squash while it is still cold they usually don't grow, but the ones that laid in the ground all winter do. What's up with that?

Back to corn, I will greenhouse transplant some this year (I'v never done that before) just to try to increase chances of simultaneous flowering between some of the different kinds I want to cross. Big Red, I suspect is much longer season than some of the others. I'm afraid if I wait to plant the shorter season ones they will get caught by the hot drought of our summers. I'll actually do some of both methods, again to increase my chances. Once I get my F1 seed though I won't do that anymore.

[copse]

Nov 23, 2014 7:29:30 GMT -5 reed said:

I do everything direct planted except tomatoes, peppers and cabbage family things and am trying to get away from even those. I have noticed volunteer tomatoes seem not to get diseased as badly and often produce better. I want lots of tomatoes to put in jars for winter, someone else can have bragging rights to "first of the season". 

Relatedly reed, there's a thread on permies about transplanting versus direct planting tomatoes.  From what I've read, the former has out performed the latter.  Honestly, I'm surprised considering how long it takes for my tomatoes to get going again, once I transplant them.

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 18, 2014 9:05:33 GMT -5 Walk said:

For ears that are a solid color, like Roy's Calais, I've been selecting seed from about 75% red ears (but not dark red) and 25% yellow, which I read somewhere that was the best way to maintain the 2 colors. But in a variety like Cascade Ruby-Gold with a broad range of ear colors, do you select equal amounts of each color or still skew it one way or the other? My planting area is small and can only fit about 200 plants, so I've been saving seed each year and mixing batches from prior years to try to keep the diversity up as much as possible. I may need to give the sweet corn the boot and just grow one corn, that would give me room for another 360 plants. If the Cascade Ruby-Gold makes even a fair sweet corn, it would probably be better for maintaining the diversity of genetics in our limited space.

Yup, you got that from me. It was in the context of the deep red color in Magic Manna. Usually, the deep red ears are smaller and the plants don't yield as well. So I used to plant basically the heterozygous reds, or at least, kernels from ears whose mothers were heterozygous red. I don't worry about it at this point. If you want more of some color, plant more of it. You don't necessarily see a simple obvious effect initially since maternal characteristics lag a generation in the patterns you get. However, if you want to keep all the colors and get maximum yield from every plant in a small planting, at least with respect to red, planting the kernels from the red (but not deep almost black-red) is still a good choice. And the same for brown. Whether the same pattern applies to Cascade Ruby-Gold deep red ears being smaller and yielding less I don't know yet. I've generally been planting, until recently, in ways that tend not to give many deep red ears. (Doing things like alternating rows of colored pericarp and gold (clear pericarp with deep yellow-orange flinty endosperm) in order to get deeper interior color for example.)

Now I'm happy enough with interior color. It's not uniformly gold, but enough of it is. And fact is, I strongly prefer the flavor of the red and orange ears in cornbread. The yellow ears taste richer than commercial yellow meal, but it's the same flavor. And I simply don't much care for it. So I used the yellow ears for polenta and the reds and oranges for cornbread. (They all taste about the same as polenta. The powerfully different flavors associated with each color only pertain to cornbread.) So last year I had my grower plant just the orange and the red in two separate adjacent blocks. I figured I'd start the process of pulling out sister lines of orange and red, as they taste quite different in cornbread, so it would be nice to have the option of having them separate. This year, the two blocks gave pretty much the same range and proportions of colors with respect to orange and red. (Maternal phenotypes lag genotypes by a generation, so not too surprising.) However, I got a very much smaller proportion of yellow ears. What I'll be doing to maintain the colors is actually selecting pure color lines with parts of the patch (including, in the future, some gold, no pericarp color), and planting a general mix with part of the patch. It will all get mixed together it what I sell as CRG. But ultimately I hope their will be 2 sister lines of CRG, orange and red, in addition to CRG with all the colors.

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 20, 2014 8:49:08 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

There is a lot of diversity within corn... I have been selecting my version of Astronomy Domine sweet corn for bright colors in the kernels in the early milk stage. When I first started growing it, many of those colors didn't show up until dough stage. There are some pericarp colors that get dark long before milk stage.

Here's an example in the early milk stage. The purples, blues, and reds are just starting to develop and obscure the endosperm color. If I had waited a couple more days to pick they would have been much darker.

Joseph--Tell me more about your 'Astronomy Domine' sweet corn. How/why you bred it, characteristics, etc. Or point me to a link where you talk about it.

[oxbowfarm]

Astronomy Domine was originally bred by Alan. But Joseph's version is clearly completely his own at this point. There are lots of threads about AD in the Poaceae forum.

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 23, 2014 7:29:30 GMT -5 reed said:

There is something I don't quite understand though. Whey I try to plant, say sun flowers or squash while it is still cold they usually don't grow, but the ones that laid in the ground all winter do. What's up with that?

Squash seeds have seed dormancy biochemistry associated with the goo we wash off when we clean the seeds. We wash the seed both to make the seed easier to handle and so that it will germinate when we want it to. The seed dormancy allows the seed to imbibe water in spring but not germinate. Microbial action breaks down the seed dormancy chemicals and the seed germinates. It takes some warmth to get enough microbial action to break down the inhibitors. With a little luck, by the time the inhibitors have been destroyed it is also warm enough for the squash seed to germinate. Of course, there might be a subsequent freeze (the reason we haven't planted our saved seed yet). In that case the germinated seed dies. However, there are probably lots more seeds in the ground whose nearby microbes hadn't yet destroyed their inhibitors, which will germinate a little later. Basically, some of that volunteer seed, assuming there is enough of it, will always manage to hit the warmth window just right and come up before you planted seed unless you too hit the warmth window just right, guessed perfectly the exact last frost, etc.

I don't know about sunflower seeds. They have the advantage of being somewhat freeze resistant, though.

[Carol Deppe]

[/quote]I suppose I am technically skewing for small root systems and slower germination as well in my beans; simply because I have no other choice. [/quote]

I think you can prevent the selection for small root systems and slower germination by being aware of it and being attentive. The selection for small root systems or slower germination tends to happen and be automatic because we usually let transplants go too long until some are the right size and some are pot-bound. Or worse yet, all are pot-bound. Under these conditions the early germinating fast-growing plant with an aggressive root system will be the worst pot bound, and suffer the worst damage in transplanting and be the worst set back.

So just make sure you transplant before the vigorous fast plants get pot-bound. This will inevitably be before many of the transplants look full size. But that's OK. Just transplant before ANYONE gets overgrown or pot-bound.

There is another issue I noticed with respect to corn, but might well be general. Some corn varieties, including most Native American varieties, put out a substantial vigorous root system first, then send up a shoot later. You can really see this is you germinate some seeds on paper towels. The roots may be two or three inches long before the shoot even appears. Modern hybrid sweet corns, though, often germinate their shoot and root about equally in timing. Such seed will actually look like it is germinating faster, but you don't necessarily want to select for it. I prefer my corns to put down a vigorous root system first, then grow their shoot. It's the shoot that is vulnerable to being pulled up by birds or eaten by insects. If the corn puts down a vigorous root system, then the shoot emerges above the soil after the root is well established, in the first place it's harder for birds to pull up the seed by pulling on the shoot. In addition, much of the stored food in the seed is used up before the shoot even emerges, so there is less reward if a bird does manage to pull up the seed. In addition, the shoot, once it emerges, shoots up rapidly because of its well-established root and stays at the tiny most vulnerable stage only very briefly.

So this is another reason to not thin too early, as if you do you may be selecting for seeds that put more of their energy into making the shoot you see early on instead of establishing a vigorous root first. And if you are transplanting, this would be a reason not to simply select all the plants that germinate first.

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 22, 2014 3:58:06 GMT -5 reed said:

I also want to select for white endosperm. I have always liked white sweet corn better than yellow and my Grand dad would only grow white corn, I don't know why. I also have this notion that it would be a visual cue to GMO contamination if yellow showed up. I don't know if that is really even true but its the best I'v got for my prejudice against yellow. It won't even be visible without dissection once I get Big Red's pericarp in there but nothing I can do about that.

Your Grand dad was in good company. The traditional sweet corn of the pioneers was always white. 'Golden Bantam' was the first yellow sweet corn that attained real acceptance. The two colors are basically entirely different flavor classes. I like both, but if I had to choose I would go for white.

As to the yellow being an indicator of GMO, that was true until recently, and still might be depending upon the possible source of contamination. Commercial GMO plantings were generally hybrid dent yellow field corns. So if you planted a white corn and screened out any yellows, you could keep out GMO contamination even if there was a field of it close enough to cause significant crossing. However, the GMOs were all field corns, so they would show up as field kernels on your sweet ears anyway. So until recently you did not really need to worry about GMO crosses into your sweet corn as long as you kernel-screened the ears chosen for planting grade before you shelled them.

Unfortunately, Seminis has recently released a number of GMO sweet corns, both yellow and bicolor. They call them "Performance" corns. Here's a link to their Performance/GMO varieties www.seminis.com/global/us/products/Pages/Performance-Series-Sweet-Corn-Seed-Varieties.aspx
So if someone is growing one of those GMO bi-color sweets nearby, there isn't any trick you can use to screen out crossed up kernels.

If someone is growing a corn patch anywhere close to where I'm growing mine, I just go and ask them what they're growing. I don't, by the way say anything like "You possibly evil crud, are you getting ready to contaminate my pristine crop with your foul GMO genes?" I just ask for the variety name in a casual way and the rough maturity time (making conversation). I don't ask about GMOs at all. But that's why I know the variety names of the GMOs or can look them up. This really only applies to keeping later corns, like 'True Gold' sweet, pure. 'Magic Manna' flour and 'Cascade Ruby-Gold flint are so early that about the only thing that crosses with them is Painted Mountain.

[blueadzuki]

Easier said than done. With the kind of chaotic temperatures we've had over the last few springs, there is usually only about a month or two when I can really count on the temperatures being conducive for growing things (the hyper cold weather has tended to linger on until the last week in June and then begin to pop up again by the middle of August) Everything either has to be really good at bearing extreme cold and heat at ANY point in it's growth (i.e. be able to basically go into stasis until things get more amenable, without actually dying due to freezing or withering from heatstroke) or be able to handle staying in a very small pot for up to a month and a half. Any plant with a reasonably vigorous root system gets rootbound by that.

I'll level with you Carol, with my climate, and soil and other issues, pretty much all of my options are simply excuses and diversions to avoid the real solution; concede that my property is not designed to work for anything except lawn and stop trying in the first place, i.e. the sensible option I will never let myself accept.

Technically there is another selection pressure I should be exerting, and will try to this upcoming year. Rice beans are still sufficiently unimproved that the have a fairly high incidence of hard seeds (around 1-2%) I've long since gotten into the habit of pre soaking all of them before planting. Not because they need it. In fact NOT soaking them would probably be better since it would mean that if I get the end of frost wrong (which with my weather I pretty much always do) the seed is still dry and better able to ride it out before better weather comes. It's mostly to avoid too many "sleeper" beans waiting it out for a year or two before coming up and messing up the color selections (I divide the crop by color but since which color gets which spot depends on how much I have of it at planting time which is where varies from year to year so older seed coming up can actually be a big problem in purifying the colors) Up till now any seed that was still hard I've then "helped" by scarifying it. But in retrospect, I probably should discard it, since all I am probably doing in ensuring that there will be hard seeds in the next generation.

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 20, 2014 12:14:08 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

Carol: It's a joy to have you here. The idea that "There is only breeding" is a powerful thought to me. It gets to the heart of why I distrust the heirloom preservation movement so much... Nothing is static. Growing a variety is changing it in some way or other even if we don't see the change.

Joseph is referring to a post I put in the "What does open-pollinated mean?" thread of the General Banter section. I'm going to repeat it here, as it is a special peeve of mine. I often get people saying they don't want to breed anything, they just want to maintain the heirlooms. Not possible. And it wouldn't be sensible even if possible. And it also just irritates me that people are willing to write off their own creativity and potential contribution and that of all their peers. Those who bred the heirlooms that have managed to survive to today had no such attitudes. It would be a bit like saying you only wanted to read classic books, not anything modern. That might be workable for fiction. But lots of luck learning any real science unless you read modern stuff. And what about news? Hundred year old news is about as useful as many heirlooms are. Some are still great, don't die at the slightest whiff of modern diseases, are competitive with modern varieties, and actually bear some resemblance to what they are supposed to be. Many, not so much. In many cases all that has been preserved is the name, which is now associated with junk; the real variety is long gone. Here's the post from the other thread:

People often think of open pollinated varieties as being finished and stable. Actually they aren't. In order to maintain an open pollinated variety you have to constantly select for the desired characteristics and rogue out off types. Mutations are quite common. Every individual plant is likely to have dozens of them. Most don't matter, but some do. Most new mutations move the plant in the direction of being more like wild plants and less desirable as food plants for people. So if you just save seed from all your plants or a random subset of them, your variety will actually deteriorate quite rapidly. One reason why many heirlooms don't measure up compared with hybrids is because the creators of the hybrids are putting their best breeding efforts into maintaining the inbreds that go into their hybrids. Meanwhile, often nobody is properly maintaining the op, and soon, it is just a name that is being sold associated with junk that no longer resembles the original heirloom at all.

There is really no such thing as "maintaining" a variety. There is only breeding. Either we breed to create something new with new characteristics. Or, if we like the characteristics in a variety, we must breed actively and select actively every generation in order to keep those characteristics.

[blueadzuki]

One of the more floury "shell" flints I got my hands on this season



and what it looked like on the cob (top ear)

[Carol Deppe]

Nov 24, 2014 9:43:04 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

Easier said than done. With the kind of chaotic temperatures we've had over the last few springs, there is usually only about a month or two when I can really count on the temperatures being conducive for growing things (the hyper cold weather has tended to linger on until the last week in June and then begin to pop up again by the middle of August) Everything either has to be really good at bearing extreme cold and heat at ANY point in it's growth (i.e. be able to basically go into stasis until things get more amenable, without actually dying due to freezing or withering from heatstroke) or be able to handle staying in a very small pot for up to a month and a half. Any plant with a reasonably vigorous root system gets rootbound by that.

I'll level with you Carol, with my climate, and soil and other issues, pretty much all of my options are simply excuses and diversions to avoid the real solution; concede that my property is not designed to work for anything except lawn and stop trying in the first place, i.e. the sensible option I will never let myself accept.

I figure if you can grow grass you can grow other things. Especially when you are passionate enough about it to transplant things like corn or beans. I started plant breeding on 3 tiny beds on a city lot in Corvallis. It's amazing what you can do if you want to enough. One of my friends lives in a deep woods and has about 2 or 3 hours of sun--just when the sun is directly overhead of his forest clearing. But he does have a greenhouse with more sun. He transplants everything. He even successfully grows Sweet Meat--Oregon Homestead, a full season squash. And this in spite of the fact that he gets several hundred pounds of SM-OH for free because he is a volunteer in my production seed growouts. Rats when made to work for food, will, if then given access to free food, eat only some of it. They continue working for some of the same food. I understand. And I think some of us have a drive to garden and maybe even create new crops bred right into our own genes.

If your plants almost inevitably get pot-bound because of rotten unpermissive planting conditions, what to do? How about simply marking the plants that emerge and grow to optimal un-pot-bound planting size first by, for example, sticking a toothpick into the soil of their pots. Then plant those in one section or end of the row and save seed from them separately, and use only that lot for planting grade seed. They may perform worse than less pot-bound material that germinates or grows slower or has wimpy root systems. However, you'll not only avoid selecting for those characteristics, you'll be able to better tell what is going on in the situation.

[reed]

Nov 24, 2014 9:43:04 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

 Everything either has to be really good at bearing extreme cold and heat at ANY point in it's growth

Tell me about it! My thoughts on dealing with it, like I said in other threads, is short season everything. Cut the time it takes to harvest and minimize chances of failure due to any reason. Happen to get a good year? Grow something else or even the same thing twice. 


(add) If I had lots of money and lots of time and lots of land I would plant thousands of everything and just let the new mother nature sort it out.