coloured popcorn?

[diane]

When I google Maíz gigante Cusco, all the pictures show white or very pale yellow kernels.

I think I will be lucky to find any for sale here. We don't have many Latin Americans living here except for Mexican workers
that our farmers fly up here in the summer. So there is not much of a market.

[blueadzuki]

The Cuzco IS white, it's the FAVA BEANS that are green.

The tricky part is finding Cuzco that is still raw, as I said, a lot of companies pre-nixmatize it.

That actually brings up one odd thing. With all of the corn needing to be nixamatized (I haven't seen many recipes for this kind of corn that use it untreated, so I have to assume that the raw stuff is for people who like to make their nixamatal fresh), you'd think the markets would also carry cal (pickling lime/calcium hydroxide) to do the actual niximatization. But they usually don't It's not a critical thing (any shop that sells pickling equipment has bags of powdered pickling lime available fairly cheaply, and given how little one needs one bag should last one years. But I wonder why it isn't sitting on the shelf next to the corn already.

[diane]

Last year I bought seeds of Mais Morado from Solana Seeds in Quebec, and sowed them in my greenhouse in the spring.

My plan was to start some normal corn late, to coincide with the expected tasselling of the Morado.

It was so wimpy I didn't bother. I have never before seen corn plants with pencil-thick stalks that couldn't even hold themselves up,
and the leaves were as narrow as wild grass. Is it normal for Andean corn to be so weak?

I should have sown some late mother plants, though, because the Morado did make tassels.

So, do I buy some more seeds and try again?

[sampiper]

Hi Diane,
I grew Maiz Morada last year, 2 to 3 small ears (~6 to 7 inch long) but the stalks were tall 10 to 12 feet. We had hail when the corn were 16 inches tall, shredded their leaves and they still came back, drought didn't stop them. Main problem was mold on most of the ears. Seeds looked black even the germ, but the endosperm was white.
They did way better than the Andean Giant white corn. Kernels size of a thumb. Tall stalks, thick but not wind proof. Wind flattened most of the stalks, made few good ears.
Bloody butcher did better than either of them. Two ears per stalk.

[steev]

Continuing further afield, I have some Bloody Butcher that I hope to plant this year; several years ago, I had decent results from Pungo Creek Bloody Butcher.

diane: Were your Mais Morado so wimpy because they were planted too early and got inadequate sun? That might be a naturally limiting factor where you are; starting early enough for their growth season, could you supplement with lights to get around the need for early starting in the low sun season?

I never write anything off with only one trial; not that I'm saying that's good sense; it's just me; good sense doesn't often intrude; curiosity drives me more than than does practicality.

[diane]

I think you were right about lack of light being the problem. I live in an area with a lot of trees - tall conifers, plus shorter but wider broad-leaved ones.

I have a hard time growing ordinary vegetables, like zucchini, and rent an allotment to grow them.

But I will try again.

[DarJones]

Look up the phytochrome system for corn to read more about the way equatorial corns respond to light. The problem we have is that our days are too long. This tells the phytochrome system to delay tasseling. The only way we could bypass this would be to cover the plants about 5 hours every day during early summer until the plants tip into reproductive mode.

I have several varieties of corn growing this year in hopes of making a few crosses. I have Maiz Morado and Cuzco Gigante which I will try to shade enough to trigger tasseling.

[diane]

I’m in Seattle, and bought some Peruvian corn and beans at Pike St Market.

Now I’m set for more tries this summer.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

A week or so ago while I was threshing, and sorting kernels for the high carotene sweet corn project, I came across some kernels with purple endosperm. They were not the purple that I have come to associate with "purple sap", they were a xenia effect. So I saved 24 kernels separate, and am intending to plant them together in a small patch. Be interesting to see if the trait is heritable. Might be nice to incorporate into a popcorn.

The genetic background of the ancestors is [Hybrid swarm of north american corns X synthetic composite of South American corns].

[walt]

I wonder if Coe's purple corn is still in the corn gene stock center.  I wonder if the center still exists.
Coe crossed together many genes for purple.  His goal, and he reached it, was to be able to use its pollen to pollinate other corns.  If the embryoes were purple, they were hybrids.  If the embryo wasn't purple, it was generally a haploid from an un-pollinated seed.  Some varieties, like Golden Bantam would have one or more haploids per ear.  Some varieties gave much fewer.  
Most seedlings from such haploid seeds would have doubled secters and could often be selfed.  Instant inbreds.
A sythetic variety made from such Golden bantam inbreds gave even higher percent haploids than the origioal variety, 4 or 5 times higher.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

Apr 10, 2018 11:42:41 GMT -5 walt said:

the corn gene stock center.  I wonder if the center still exists.

It still exists.
maizecoop.cropsci.uiuc.edu
www.maizegdb.org/stock_catalog

I've thought about requesting seed for the old gold gene (yellow striped foliage corn) as i have lost it.