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Post by reed on Sept 29, 2014 20:46:28 GMT -5
Corn pollen can travel long distances. That doesn't mean it does given your specific region and wind and weather conditions and topography. It looks to me from your picture and description of being more than a mile from any other corn patch that you have excellent isolation for corn. I don't think you have much to worry about except what you bring in and plant yourself. I'd find out exactly where the corn was grown and what other corn was nearby before I planted those ears. (If you test the corn for GMOs and it tests dirty, that is that. But if it tests clean, it only says there were no GMOs in the 100 kernels you sacrificed and aren't going to plant. There could still be a stray GMO kernel in what you plant.) It always helps if you keep seed from the inside of your patch instead of the edges. That way if there is any stray pollen it is more likely to be diluted out by pollen produced by your own patch. In Indian and pioneer days, many crops were "self-isolated" by virtue of the fact that they simply were grown in large enough fields of one variety so that nearly all the seed that was saved came from deep inside the patch. It's when we have tiny patches that we have to pay the most attention to isolation from other varieties. And distance and volume both matter. If there are several square miles of corn a block from where you live, you are going to have some contamination. If there is a neighbor with a small corn patch a block from where you live, that may be no problem. One way I get avoid GMO contamination is that I have focused on early corns. The GMO feed corns, as far as I know, are all fairly late compared with the corns I breed. Most GMO corns are yellow dents. You can see a cross of a yellow corn onto a white corn, but not onto another yellow or any other color. And not too many of us would want to limit ourselves to growing just white corn. We can see crosses of a flour onto a flint but not usually the reverse. And dents might or might not show up in crosses to flours or flints. There are now also GM0 sweet corns too. I personally consider hand pollinating impractical when you are growing enough to use as a serious food source or even to maintain a variety if you are keeping the numbers up. Most Indian or heterogeneous corn has heterogeneous relationships between when the baby ears appear and when the first silks emerge. So you might have to bag and check the ear every day for two weeks just to do a single hand pollination. No thanks. As to what to do with those round glassy kernels...Those are kernels that have mostly flinty instead of mostly floury endosperm. Pure flint corns, far from being grown just if you can't grow other things, are the best for certain purposes. Buffalo Bird Woman thought her "hard white" (flint) was especially delicious, but it was more difficult to grind than the "soft". Pure flints cook well by boiling or steaming. They make great polenta, mush, corn pudding, and johnnycakes. (And wet-batter cornbread.) Pure flour corns are better baked. I use them mostly for cake, for gravy, and for parching corn (when they are the right color types.) (They also make good wet-batter cornbread.) Dent corns don't make good polenta unless you screen and separate out and use just the flinty part. They don't make good crackers, cookies, etc either. They can make good wet batter cornbread (as do the other types). (Essentially, a wetbatter cornbread starts off being boil/steamed, then ends up being baked.) Any corn can be nixtamalized to make hominy, then tortillas, etc., if you are up for the work. So with a mixed type you pretty much will end up making a wet batter cornbread or nixtamalizing. Colors affect flavor of cornbread a lot, by the way. Every color has a different flavor. Lots of times mixes with lots of different colors in them bake into cornbread that ends up tasting like mud. Some corns actually taste bad. I found one that makes a cornbread that tastes a whole lot like soap. Most "Indian" corns were not mixed color types. They were pure colors. And they were not mixed flint/flour/dent types. They were mostly pure flints or pure flours. I don't grow dents at all because anything I can do with a dent I can do with a flint or flour, but the other things I can do with pure flints or pure flours I can't do with a dent. Generally, sweet corn does not make good cornbread or polenta. It has a kind of foul bitter taste in cornbread. It has a foul flavor as well as texture as polenta. Those who use do use sweet corn for cornbread are usually diluting it with wheat or other things, not depending upon the cooking and flavor of the corn itself. You can eat any field corn in the green stage, but it may not last long enough in that stage to gather a batch, and it may not be very sweet. Many flour and dent corn varieties are quite sweet in the green stage. I greatly enjoyed your post, I'm glad I read it in September instead of next April because for me it like a big WRONG WAY sign. I want to do like Joseph and make my own land race corn but I see my thinking has been wrong. I want corn that is a good sweet corn but I'm fine with it only bring that way for a few days at best. I more want it to be good for other things especially corn bread. I was thinking of using sweet varieties mixed with dent varieties and trying to achieve this goal. It sounds like that is totally wrong, I'm wondering now if I need SE or even SU in my mix at all. In fact they may mess it up more than they help. As far as avoiding GMO assuming I start clean, I think I am in pretty good shape. I highlighted some things in your post that really stood out to me. "One way I get avoid GMO contamination is that I have focused on early corns" I thought of that too but unfortunately still in my sweet frame of mind. I have acquired several that I may not want to use after all, including Blue Jade, Fire on the Mountain, Yukon Supreme and others. "And not too many of us would want to limit ourselves to growing just white corn." I might not be above that assuming I could find several varieties that fit my plans and that taste good. "I personally consider hand pollinating impractical" I don't plan on that either, the farthest I might go is to de-tassel some kinds "As to what to do with those round glassy kernels...Colors affect flavor of cornbread a lot, by the way. Every color has a different flavor". Very Interesting, are the glassy ones flint or flour? Is there a visual difference between flint and flour? Today I put a tiny bit of butter in an iron skillet and tossed in some of those big glassy kernels. The white ones especially and the yellow, blue and purple were kinda nasty. The RED ones though were incredible. They tasted like pop corn kernels that failed to pop except way way better. They didn't even have hulls. I could easily cook them up with a little more butter and eat them all up. I might never thought of doing that if I hadn't read your post. "I don't grow dents at all because anything I can do with a dent I can do with a flint or flour, but the other things I can do with pure flints or pure flours I can't do with a dent." There's that wrong way sign again, I also bought some dent varieties, sounds like I might not need. "Many flour and dent corn varieties are quite sweet in the green stage." Yep, since I don't want to freeze, can or sell sweet corn, SU, SE, Sh this and that might not even matter to me, a few days summer time treat is all I care about in the sweet department. |
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Post by reed on Sept 29, 2014 21:22:39 GMT -5
blueadzuki If it is anything of interest it would be a waste for me to keep it, I'm too much of a novice. Message me your address and I will ship it off to you. I'll also reexamine the cobs and see if there are any more like it. If any others look interesting let me know the cob # and I'll pull a few off them too. I am always looking for more common pole beans or runner beans or early tomatoes, whatever you might have extra of.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Sept 29, 2014 23:03:27 GMT -5
flowerweaver, when I last grew out and selected the Supai it gave about 20% pure white ears. The red striped gene is apparently heterozygous in at least some plants and ears. Since the gene is expressed in the pericarp, which is made by the mother plant, ears are usually totally striped or totally white. (Though jumping genes are involved, and one occasionally gets ears of one type with a patch of the other.) Anyway, you can sort the white ears into one lot and make a lovely white flour for pancakes, sweetbreads, cookies, biscuits, and crackers. Then from the red-striped ears you make parching corn, a different flavor of cracker, and a delicious nonsweet bread. If you want more pancakes etc, just save seed from a bigger portion of white ears. If you want more parching corn etc, save more seed from the red-striped eats.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Sept 29, 2014 23:24:21 GMT -5
Here's what's probably going on with the sweet kernels with the opaque skins. Usually, the sweet gene is in a flint or dent corn background. Those generally have a clearish looking paricarp, not the opaque pericarp typical of flour corns. Flint corns have lots of flinty endosperm and little floury endosperm. Very pure floury corns have nearly all floury endosperm and almost no flint at all. The sweet gene, among other things seems to cut down the amount of floury endosperm to nearly nothing in many cases.
If you cross a good flour type to a sweet corn in its typical flint or dent background, a good bit of what segregates in the F2 is kernels with opaque skins that are highly shriveled and in fact have pretty close to no endosperm at all. In those kernels, I think the kernel inherited mostly flour endosperm type and the sweet gene removed most of the floury endosperm. So you end up with an almost empty kernel. There is the opaque seed coat and aleurone typical of a flour corn, and there is a germ. But there is hardly any endosperm at all. Such kernels don't germinate very well or give rise to very vigorous plants.
The kernel that is more wrinkled and purplish on one side than the other is not especially unusual. The wrinkling pattern is variable even in a pure genetic background, and is very variably in a mixed genetic background. The purplish kernel is heterozygous for the black aleurone gene. Depending upon genetic background, heterozygous black can express itself uniformly as any shade all the way from very light blue to pure black or in a mosaic pattern with some parts of the kernel colored and others not. So this kernel is heterozygous for black which happened to express itself as a mosaic pattern on one side of the kernel and not the other.
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 30, 2014 12:38:59 GMT -5
In Finger Lakes, they use Hickory King Dent for making whiskey. So there is a use for dent corn. Nice to hear from you Carol!
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Post by oxbowfarm on Sept 30, 2014 20:29:40 GMT -5
Here's what's probably going on with the sweet kernels with the opaque skins. Usually, the sweet gene is in a flint or dent corn background. Those generally have a clearish looking paricarp, not the opaque pericarp typical of flour corns. Flint corns have lots of flinty endosperm and little floury endosperm. Very pure floury corns have nearly all floury endosperm and almost no flint at all. The sweet gene, among other things seems to cut down the amount of floury endosperm to nearly nothing in many cases. If you cross a good flour type to a sweet corn in its typical flint or dent background, a good bit of what segregates in the F2 is kernels with opaque skins that are highly shriveled and in fact have pretty close to no endosperm at all. In those kernels, I think the kernel inherited mostly flour endosperm type and the sweet gene removed most of the floury endosperm. So you end up with an almost empty kernel. There is the opaque seed coat and aleurone typical of a flour corn, and there is a germ. But there is hardly any endosperm at all. Such kernels don't germinate very well or give rise to very vigorous plants. The kernel that is more wrinkled and purplish on one side than the other is not especially unusual. The wrinkling pattern is variable even in a pure genetic background, and is very variably in a mixed genetic background. The purplish kernel is heterozygous for the black aleurone gene. Depending upon genetic background, heterozygous black can express itself uniformly as any shade all the way from very light blue to pure black or in a mosaic pattern with some parts of the kernel colored and others not. So this kernel is heterozygous for black which happened to express itself as a mosaic pattern on one side of the kernel and not the other. Carol, very excited to see you contributing here on HG. I have to say I've never seen the opaque pericarp associated with floury kernels that you are describing. In every floury corn kernel I've ever seen, the kernel was definitely opaque, but I attribute that to floury starch being opaque. Pericarp is maternal tissue, and expressed based on the genetics of the plant rather than the embryo. So if floury genetics creates an opaque pericarp then all pericarp on flour corn plants should be opaque, and I've never seen that. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I don't think it is a universal effect across all flour corn. Here's and example from some of my own seed ears from this years breeding projects.  These are all ears of Coroico X White Flour Grex F1. The mother plants of these ears were all Coroico. They were detasselled and pollinated by my white flour corn grex. Most of the Coroico is floury, but a few ears like these three, show segregation of flinty and floury kernels. The flinty kernels are quite glassy and flinty looking. The floury kernels are floury and opaque. I don't think pericarp transparency differs between flour or flint. There are definitely lots of genetic variations possible with pericarp, pigments, thickness, etc, but it is independent of starch composition. |
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Post by reed on Oct 3, 2014 16:49:19 GMT -5
blueadzuki I got you package ready to send and should be able to get to the post office with it on Monday. I included all the seeds of that one cob including the one that interested you and also the ones below.  They all have those speckles you mentioned or stripes, you only got two of those with the single stripe cause there aren't many of those and I haven't tested those cobs yet. I also dropped in a few of our favorite (for green bean) pole beans. Don't know how they are dry but will find out soon, weather is getting cooler.
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Post by reed on Oct 3, 2014 16:53:00 GMT -5
Well, not that whole cob, just the shriveled up ones.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 3, 2014 16:56:41 GMT -5
Some nice stipple there. BTW that kind of striping is called "chinmarking"
I should be able to get YOUR seed (the "frosted flint") in soon (PM the mailing address)
If there were any other that caught your eye in the pic, let me know.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 12:13:22 GMT -5
reed--I, too started off trying to find a sweet corn that was also good for other things. That was about 30 years ago. I wasted a good five years or more on that approach before I was familiar enough with corn to know what good polenta, parched corn, etc. tasted like. The Indians knew what they were doing. They had sweet corn but grew very little of it, and only for special purposes. (To eat fresh in the green stage, and to dry the green-staged cooked corn for rehydrating in winter soups and stews.) They did not grow it for using the dry grain for making bread, tortillas, polenta, mush, or really as much of a staple. On top of not tasting good for those things, it is self-defeating to grow a grain for the food/endosperm content and then use a genetic mutation in which every kernel fails to develop a full endosperm.
Yes, pure flint kernels and pure flour kernels are distinct and obviously different. But there are plenty of varieties that are in between. The glassy kernels are flint types. As for the red kernels that blew you away, yes. Welcome to parching corn. I have a whole section on it in the corn chapter of The Resilient Gardener. There is an old article of mine on it I did for National Gardening way back when that is free on the internet now that can be found by googling parching corn and my name. I think the title of the original article was "Rediscovering Parching Corn." The photos in the article aren't appropriate and aren't the ones that went with the original magazine piece. They are just some random photos someone shoved in when turning the piece into an internet article.
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Post by Carol Deppe on Oct 8, 2014 12:19:10 GMT -5
oxbowfarm, right. I should have said opaque looking kernels, not opaque pericarp. Pericarp is indeed maternally inherited. And I can't tell on that third ear in your picture, but in the first two ears, there is obviously segregation for flour and flint type.
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Post by copse on Oct 8, 2014 14:05:04 GMT -5
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Post by reed on Oct 9, 2014 21:45:47 GMT -5
Well, it's time to do something with all this corn. I think I will try to sell some for ornamental purposes on E-Bay and see if I can get some of my money back. First though I wanted to see if any of you want some of it. blueadzuki seems to like the speckled ones so he gets first choice for more of those. flowerweaver mentioned a cob she thought was interesting so it is tagged for her if she wants it. Anyone else that wants some can message me their address and I will shell some off and send it. You can send me back anything you have extra of. Landrace things especially, tomatoes, winter squash, broccoli, beans, carrots - especially carrots or what ever you have. I'm keeping most of the glassy ones especially red, pink and purple ones for possible use in my new corn patch. I may try to divide it into two patches. Plant those early su sweets I'v collected real early and fill in any that don't make it with the super early ones like Yukon Supreme and Orchard Baby. In the middle of that a row of Painted mountain and de-tassel the Painted Mountain. Maybe even throw in the modern sweets Spring Snow and Argent. Then a few weeks later plant some of this along with my own from last year and some other flour and flint types, again with a de-tasseled row of Painted Mountain in the middle of that. That should separate tassel times enough to prevent a total mix up give me some interesting seeds for the following year. Then I can run my taste, parch tests again and see what to plant the next year. Maybe I can end up with early sweet and mid to late parching, meal types that can be planted at the same time. It's a plan but not a solid one. Sometime next April or May corn seeds are going in the ground, that that's the only part that isn't subject to change based on what else I learn between now and then. O'yea I got the full name of the grower and he lives not very far away, so I imagine I can get all of this I might want. I just haven't had time to track him down yet. |
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Post by reed on Oct 13, 2014 5:12:28 GMT -5
copse, thanks for posting the link to Carol's article. Carol Deppe, your article was a wonderful read, sounds to me like parching corn is the way to go for me. Being sweet in the early stage is all I want as far as sweet goes. I want corn bread and now that I have discovered parching that too, way better than pop corn for a snack! I have tons more questions but will refrain as your books should be at my house tomorrow, I might have to skip work and wait for the delivery. I will ask just one, what is your opinion of these ears? 
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 13, 2014 9:51:45 GMT -5
There are two different traits going on with sweet corn: One is sweetness, and the other is tenderness. I think that what is most important in a corn for fresh eating is tenderness. A lot of the flour and flint corns have a hard-gritty texture from a very young age. I consider gritty corn unsuitable for fresh eating. I haven't been interested in finding a dual purpose corn, I grow sweet corn, popcorn, and experimental hybrid swarms. If I were looking for a dual purpose corn that could be eaten fresh and made into flour I would look into Hopi Pink or Hopi Blue.
I am not fond of the idea of eating "parching corn" as a daily staple, because it is not nixtamalized, which can lead to pellagra if eaten as a large component of the diet. As an occasional snack parched corn is perfectly fine with me. I acknowledge that parching corn can also be nixtamalized and used as a flour corn, but most articles I read treat is as an entirely distinct crop.
Last fall when I was testing popcorn, I found one cob that popped entirely off-type. It cooked up more like puffed rice than like a popcorn. It was delightful to eat. I didn't replant it, because it was so far off type, and because I really do pay attention to isolation issues even though I talk like I'm totally cavalier about them. It sure fired up my imagination though!!! I entertained all sorts of fantasies about a new class of corn.
To me, the best possible parching corn is sugary enhanced sweet corn. I wouldn't grow it as a staple crop though because it is unreliable in my cold garden. Whenever I parch corn I use plain old-fashioned su sweet corn. It grows reliably for me and parches up tender and sweet -- not like the hard gritty kernels that come to me labeled as "parching corn".
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