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Post by reed on Mar 1, 2015 18:49:36 GMT -5
It's time to start planning what I am going to do with the corn I'v accumulated so I started trying to plan out some options. Sweet corn isn't even my primary goal but since I have it I'v decided to try to do both a sweet and a flour / flint for cornbread. The beginning of a plan for the sweet is below. In keeping with the musical theme I decided to call it Dazed & Confused, at least for now. The other plan will follow separately. I personally am fine with plain old su corn but in order to make it more widely appealing I want to mix in a good amount of se. 2015 will be mostly to make crosses and increase seed. Little specific is in mind at this point. I eventually want an early, or rather short season, diverse, drought tolerant and yummy sweet corn that can beat others to market. I will also eventually select for mostly white endosperm and colorless aleurone. I have 1/4 lbs of a few varieties and just packets of most. I am already selecting to some degree by picking kernels I like the looks of. For example in three packs of Anasazi from Sandhill (they sent extra) I found about thirty kernels that are larger and more rectangular than the rest and are very light color, I like them so they may be the only Anasazi seeds planted. I found about twenty or thirty each of solid white and solid dark red in my Painted Mountain that will probably go into the cornbread patch rather than sweet. Mother nature will apply the next round of selection by deciding what grows in lightly prepared soil with no amendments and little or no ability to irrigate. In the list (mother / father) means that some will be planted in alternate areas detasseled in one and not in the other. (mother / father / selfed) will be done that way also with extra in the father part so that some pollinates it self. I hope to be able to confirm at least some of the crosses by finding white on what should be blue or red on what should be white. Of course all from the detasseled will be crosses. I'll have to do selection from the f1 seed because of limited space and that's what the percentages are. They are of course very rough and will most likely change. It's gonna be fun!
[add] I forgot, I'll try so that all or at least most of the crosses will between su and se types. They can mix it up with their own kind in future generations.
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Post by reed on Mar 2, 2015 5:36:21 GMT -5
Rather than make two threads for my two corn projects I changed the name of this one. I don't have as many kinds to work with on what I'm calling my cornbread corn. Cornbread to me is a kinda dry, crumbly stuff that you make in an iron skillet and eat with ham and beans. It should also be good just as a snack with a little butter or with butter and jelly for breakfast. It isn't soft, moist cake-like stuff that a lot of people make now days. I don't have near as many kinds to start with for it as I do the sweet. That's because I had accumulated a lot of them before I found this forum and got a better idea of what I want, which is a good staple food for people and critters. I may try to get a few more even though my seed budget is way out of control already. For this project I want a fast maturing, tasty, drought resistant corn that makes cornbread without adding any thing else and that is good other ways such as parched. I want a mix of flour and flint but I don't want dent. The Oxacan green is there for drought tolerance but any dented kernels will be selected out in future generations. Again, in future I'll be selecting for white endosperm and clear aleurone. A bonus here is it will also be a good ornamental corn and if I can get it to where I can harvest no later than August I can beat others around here to that market. At $1.00 an ear it sells for way, way more than sweet corn at two or three dollars per dozen and if it doesn't sell one week you can keep it till the next. There is some chance I could get some, maybe all of my seed money back this year.  Even though it looks smaller this is my primary project. I got a couple other smaller ones too, involving the "Red" ears and some of Carol's varieties and also a single sweet kernel I found in Painted Mountain. Those will be going on in isolation form these projects. |
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Post by ottawagardener on Mar 2, 2015 16:26:14 GMT -5
Can I just love dazed and confused as the title of your corn projects. It makes me like anything you produce already.
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Post by reed on Mar 4, 2015 7:12:06 GMT -5
Thanks, ottawagardener . The name is more descriptive of the grower than the crop. Pericarp, aleurone, chi-sq, recessive, dominate, F1, faint memories of high school biology. Jumping genes? What the heck is that? |
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Post by ottawagardener on Mar 4, 2015 9:10:48 GMT -5
Gotta love genes that jump  |
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Post by reed on Mar 5, 2015 8:15:47 GMT -5
I know I have a problem, I know I do but I can't help it. I just added three more varieties to my list. Mandan Red Clay from Uprising Seeds, Carol recommended it as a good match to go with my red ears, so this one is her fault. Then Hopi Pink and Hopi White from Native Seed Search because they are pretty and described as very drought tolerant.
I'll quit now, I promise. With almost thirty kinds including Astronomy Domine and Painted Mountain something should settle out here in Indiana. Wonder how long it will take?
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Post by oxbowfarm on Mar 5, 2015 9:01:27 GMT -5
For this project I want a fast maturing, tasty, drought resistant corn that makes cornbread without adding any thing else and that is good other ways such as parched. I want a mix of flour and flint but I don't want dent. The Oxacan green is there for drought tolerance but any dented kernels will be selected out in future generations. Again, in future I'll be selecting for white endosperm and clear aleurone. You're going to have to decide what type of corn you want this to be. You cannot parch dents or flints, you will just be helping your dentist make his boat payments. If you want to make a parching corn out of this you need to select out a flour corn line. I have no problem with the landrace approach, but even Joseph selects heavily for his desired kernel traits. In order for a corn to be a parching corn it needs very specific kernel characteristics. Likewise a popcorn. If you mix other genetics in you have to select like a maniac to get back to the desired phenotype in the kernel. I'd like to hear your definition of Flour/flint. |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 5, 2015 10:56:59 GMT -5
With almost thirty kinds including Astronomy Domine and Painted Mountain something should settle out here in Indiana. Wonder how long it will take? I find the third growing season to be the magical one when working with mostly outcrossing varieties... I have no problem with the landrace approach, but even Joseph selects heavily for his desired kernel traits. In order for a corn to be a parching corn it needs very specific kernel characteristics. Likewise a popcorn. If you mix other genetics in you have to select like a maniac to get back to the desired phenotype in the kernel. I sure know the pain of starting out with too wide of a genetic base. My popcorn started out by accident because I included some popcorn seed in a planting of decorative corn. The second year I planted it again as decorative corn. There were some hybrids between the two that grew gloriously, and were pretty as anything, and highly productive, and popped adequately. So I started re-selecting for popcorn. It's been tons of work. I suppose lots more than if I had started with only popcorn varieties. I don't know though, there are some pretty badly maintained popcorns out there. Perhaps the vigor of my popcorn is due in part to something that could have only come in through the decorative corns. Again it's hard to know or to measure. I'm still casting a wide net to bring new genetics into my popcorn, but these days I'm tending to do it by crossing, and then one or two generations of back-crossing. I still get the traits I want, but don't drag in so much junk. I'm not actively searching for parching corn, but the only corns that I have found that I consider to be even semi-decent as parching corn are the sugary enhanced and old fashioned sweet corns. Those traits are incompatible with both flour and flint traits. Popcorn growing in a field that hadn't been fertilized in more than 5 years.  |
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Post by reed on Mar 5, 2015 11:49:02 GMT -5
For this project I want a fast maturing, tasty, drought resistant corn that makes cornbread without adding any thing else and that is good other ways such as parched. I want a mix of flour and flint but I don't want dent. The Oxacan green is there for drought tolerance but any dented kernels will be selected out in future generations. Again, in future I'll be selecting for white endosperm and clear aleurone. You're going to have to decide what type of corn you want this to be. You cannot parch dents or flints, you will just be helping your dentist make his boat payments. If you want to make a parching corn out of this you need to select out a flour corn line. I have no problem with the landrace approach, but even Joseph selects heavily for his desired kernel traits. In order for a corn to be a parching corn it needs very specific kernel characteristics. Likewise a popcorn. If you mix other genetics in you have to select like a maniac to get back to the desired phenotype in the kernel. I'd like to hear your definition of Flour/flint. Well, I hate when people ask questions I can't answer.  I guess in words it might be what Carol described in one of her posts as a "dent-less" dent. I can't do better than that but this is what it looks like.  Big kernels with a nice layer of flint around the outside. I'm going to self this ear and at the same time cross it onto some others to see what happens. It apparently breaks all the rules in that it kinda half pops instead of just cracking. It tastes great and has no unpleasant qualities at all. I set aside a corner in the chicken lot for this little project isolated form the others. I strongly suspect that this ear is long season which defeats my purpose in a couple of ways so at the same time I am going to try to reproduce it's properties in a a shorter season. All the ears I tried that had this configuration had those same qualities except this was the best tasting. I hope to eventually have a short season corn with those traits and that consistently makes some percentage of ears this color. I'm new to this plant breeding thing but within a short time of getting the idea I found this corn, I found this forum and I found a 100 year old corn grinder now perfectly restored except for paint. |
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Post by reed on Mar 12, 2015 5:28:42 GMT -5
My percentage method of selecting next years seed has already gone by the way side. Instead I'm assigning a priority level that indicates whether or not a variety contributes pollen, is used as mother only or both. I am after diversity to select from in the future and don't want for example to undo the work that went into Painted Mountain or AD by overwhelming them with something else. On the flint / flour project I am not really after primarily a parching corn. Having recently learned about parching it was the only way I could think of to test for how they might taste as cornbread. Turned out the texture is also very important. oxbowfarm, your word is well taken, in reexamining the seeds one especially has already been eliminated. The tiny, glassy kernels of Wampum isn't the way I want to go. I might grow twenty or so plants since I have it but they won't be allowed to contribute pollen to the patch and depending on how they come out likely won't be planted the next year. Same with Fiesta although it's kernels are larger and are not terribly tooth breaking when parched, they are also not anything to rave about culinary wise. The real kicker is I have no evidence at all that something that tastes good parched will come out as good corn bread. I haven't had good corn bread for a long, long time so I'll just have to see how it goes. I call it flint / flour because the smaller glassy kernels, as I understand it flint, are for the most part like gravel. The entirely flour kernels like PM and Cherokee White Flour taste like paste. All the dents I tried were gravel, paste or both. Somewhere in there however is something just right I went over plans last last night and reviewed how to plant. The main patch will have about a 1000 plants of the flint / flour with PM well represented. It is about 400 or so feet from away from any of the others, that's the best I can do. Two sweet patches about 150 feet apart will make a total of about 500 plants. One will be mostly a mix with lots of se and some 50 or so detasseled AD mixed in. The other one will be mostly AD with about 50 or so of the others mixed in and detasseled. If in the future the se selects itself back out, o'well. A fourth patch about 200 feet away will be pretty much as Carol Deppe advised in one of her posts in another thread. The red ears, pollinating some of her manna and some Mandan Red Clay to see what that produces. One of my first goals is to get to the point where I can stop keeping track of who is pollinating who and just save my favorite seed each year, I wonder how long that will take. Joseph Lofthouse, If I can get a corn field that looks like that one, I'll be happy almost no matter what its good for. The worst would be chicken food and a few bucks for fall decorations. |
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Post by jondear on Mar 12, 2015 10:16:27 GMT -5
It'll be interesting to see how it all works out for you reed.
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Post by reed on Apr 3, 2015 6:30:17 GMT -5
In re-reading Carol's "Breed Your Own Vegetables" it jumped out to me that with a nice diverse cross you might make a whole new line out of just one plant. If that's the case it adds more than a little to the Dazed & Confusedness but mostly in a good way. Assuming things go well as far as bringing a crop to maturity and with approximately forty different kinds and around 1500 plants I can expect to end up with dozens, maybe hundreds of options for the following year.
Take the sweet for example. Say I detassel a dozen Astronomy Domine surrounded by 100 se hybrids and in anther spot do the opposite, the resulting 24 mothers would be a good start to begin selecting from. But I'm going to do a lot more than that, for example throwing in some Painted Mountain and possibly some Hopi Pink and White and all the other su kinds so it will get complicated. I think my sweet project is the easy part though. It's easy to taste and easy to see on a dry cob so all I got to do is mix it up and start selecting, it might take years to settle into something reasonably uniform with cold and drought tolerance and short season but it should all be good along the way.
My flour/meal project is a whole other issue. It has so many variables and nuances that I just don't have the experience to grasp yet. I know I like corn bread and I love the flavor of those dark red ears and that anything too flinty probably isn't good but much beyond that is going to be trial and error. It reminds me a little of standing on a mountain in California one day years ago with some little boards locked on my feet and a bunch of people telling me what to do. Finally I put the skis together and pointed em down, from then on gravity provided excellent instruction, mostly in what I shouldn't do.
No way I'll be able to follow up with all the possibilities I might end up with and hate the thought of having to abandon most of them. I will have to invest in a freezer just for corn and aggressively recruit co-conspirators to continue in 2016 and beyond.
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Post by templeton on Apr 3, 2015 21:28:53 GMT -5
Reed, I think you've just set the controls for the heart of the sun. I love your boldness, perhaps what Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister would have called 'A very courageous decision, minister' If you really want to go the mass cross road, go for it, but... Having fiddled round with a few breeding projects (but not corn, I must emphasize), the diversity expands exponentially with each generation, you end up with so many possibilities that it's mind numbing. You're not going to need a new seed fridge, you are going to need a walk-in cool room! From my experience messing around with coloured snow/snap peas, where the genetics are relatively simple (unlike corn), choosing good parents is really worthwhile. I tried to hedge my bets and did 5 different crosses using different snow parents. The F2-F5 growouts took up so much time and space I've ended up using only 2 lines, and there is so much variety in these I still don't have enough resources to explore the things i want to. And the second fridge is overflowing with 'just in case' seed lots. Have you thought about the number of plants you will need to grow (and assess) in the F2 and later generations to have a good chance of the desired characteristics showing up? A smart approach (that I should have used) is to aim for some intermediary crosses, where the characteristics are relatively easy to assess, then cross these up to get toward the end result. I would do some de-tasselling/bagging of 6 or 8 parent groups, aiming for 3 or 4 mostly stable intermediate lines, that could then be de-tasselled/crossed to each other. Should provide lots of diversity, but even if you only get a limited gene pool, you can always introduce extra lines one at a time to up the diversity, and find you desired characteristics more readily, without them getting swamped. While you would need to put extra effort into record keeping and working out planting times to synchronise pollination, and some detailed work early on, makes the later generations a fair bit easier. Wonder what the experienced corn breeders think about this? T |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Apr 3, 2015 21:55:53 GMT -5
I could have spent a lifetime pursuing traits that showed up in the F3 of my red-podded pea project. A tremendous diversity arose from just that one cross. There were so many really clever peas with green pods, or yellow pods. I had to ignore them to focus on red-pods.
I have mostly given up record keeping in favor of recurrent mass selection, or sibling group selection. It was just too easy to get so bogged down in record keeping that note-taking required more time than actual growing.
I wing the synchronous pollination. I'll plant the same variety a few weeks apart during the season, perhaps before and after the pollinator, and hopefully something will overlap.
I've been burned by failing to detassel something, or introducing an undesirable trait. These days I tend to keep the off-types to less than 5% of the patch. That way if I totally fail, and mix up the seed, or get sick instead of detasseling, then I haven't messed up the whole crop, only about 5% of it.
I'm feeling drawn towards growing corn for tortillas and hominy. I'm wondering if that means that I won't grow popcorn this year... I only have so many isolation options, and I'm not willing to give up sweet corn.
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Post by DarJones on Apr 4, 2015 1:02:28 GMT -5
I've got my breeding line of Country Gentleman X Sugar Enhanced sweet corn ready to plant. It is F2 seed so the segregation will be at maximum. One plant in 16 should have all the traits I am after so I need to grow about 100 plants to have a good chance of ID'ing a few good tasting ears.
I've also got the high protein high oil breeding lines to work on.
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I guess in words it might be what Carol described in one of her posts as a "dent-less" dent. I can't do better than that but this is what it looks like.
