Corn crossing

[Deleted]

While crossing corn is it that some genes are only given by the male, some only by the female? I was thinking of mixing Cherokee squaw and mesquakie Indian, I didn't know if I needed both male and female from both var to give an accurate depiction of the genes.
At what stage does de tasseling occur, should I just cut off the top of the plant once I can see the slightest tassel? How mature must the tassel be before pollen shed.

If later on I mixed say Cherokee white flour corn, with a dent corn, would it be fairly possible to then make it fairly homogenous in that it's either a dent or flour type kernel? I plan on eating some hominy and I figure that different types of kernels may soften at different rates, does that adversely effect the hominy? 

When corns days to maturity are different should I simply count the number of days they are different by, or is the number more variable?

i have a neighbor 1/4 mile away growing sweet corn, it's only a few hundred sq ft of it though, with trees in between, so hopefully I don't catch much of his drift.

my intent with this is having a sturdy corn. I may mix blue clarage in the mutt to, only time will tell what makes it.

[walt]

Other than male sterile cytoplasm, very few corn genes only are carried through the male line or just the female line. The one or two (it has been a long time) I know about effect the pollen and limit crossing between corn races. I strongly doubt they are even in your two varieties. So I'd think crossing either way will give the same result in the long run.
Watch your corn. When you see anthers hanging down from the tassel, it is ready to shed pollen, or has just done it. Heat and humidity determine what time of day pollen is released. In Kansas, I get pollen shed about 9:00 to 10:00 AM.
I find that tassels don't shed pollen until the tassel is full grown. But a fully grown tassel of one variety may look like a young tassel of another variety. So I can't describe how it looks when to remove the tassel. Cutting off the tassel as soon as you see it would work. But if you do it very young, the remainder will keep growing and you would need to cut it again the next day. But that would work. Under unusual weather conditions, some varieties do start to shed pollen before the tassel is fully out of the leaf sheath. That is not the norm.
When a flour corn and a dent corn cross, the seeds all look like dent. If you see some flour seeds, they aren't crosses. You can't tell if a dent seed is crossed with flour pollen though. At least I can't. Unless there is also a color difference between the dent and flour in your cross.
In the next generation, you can pick out the flour looking seeds, they should breed true for flour type. The dent seeds won't be pure dent. They should be about 1/3 pure dent, 2/3 hybrid at the dent/flour gene locus. To get pure dent, one must keep removing flour seeds forever, or self pollinate each stalk, and discard those that show any flour seeds. Most people just keep removing the four types if they don't want them, and live with the few flour seeds. By discard, I mean eat, of course.
Corn maturity dates are not fixed. In hot weather, O'odham 60 Day Flour corn blooms before Gaspe Flint. In cool weather, Gaspe Fint blooms before O'odham 60 Day Flour. When I have made crosses between early and late corn, I have planted a row of the longer season corn with a row of the shorter season corn, another row of the long season corn, a row of the shorter season corn but planted a week later, long season corn again, then the shorter season corn 2 weeks later, etc. until the rows are at the point where the days to maturity numbers say they should bloom together. Rows that don't match up may be eaten, so nothing is wasted.
Last year I did a different way. I planted a seed of each every day until the first seeds planted were ripe corn. I was going to be there to hand pollinate, so it didn't matter that the plants were too far apart for the wind to cross them.
Your neighbor's corn 1/4 mile away won't be a problem.
Welcome to the group, oldhack.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Apr 28, 2018 6:23:38 GMT -5 @oldhack said:

At what stage does de tasseling occur, should I just cut off the top of the plant once I can see the slightest tassel?

My strategy is to pull the tassels from the mother of the cross as they emerge. I grab the tassel as soon as practical, and yank it straight up. Pop.

[oxbowfarm]

The mother plant contributes all the cytoplasm, and all the cytoplasmic DNA from the organelles that have DNA, sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't.

[Deleted]

Is it reasonable to believe while crossing, that one can make good hominy, if selecting only flour kernels, and not just a variable mess of cooked and uncooked kernels, because of irregular density? Assuming I separate the different colored kernels.

I,ve heard saving seed one should shoot for selecting from 50 or more plants. Can you select from less, if it is recently crossed, because of more variable genetics?

[reed]

May 14, 2018 3:38:33 GMT -5 @oldhack said:

I,ve heard saving seed one should shoot for selecting from 50 or more plants. Can you select from less, if it is recently crossed, because of more variable genetics?

I think the short answer is happily, yes. 

I'v read that you should save seed from a minimum of 200 plants to avoid inbreeding depression. That is simply not possible in my garden and looking for other options is partly what brought me to this forum. Turns out from what I'v learned is that the 200 really only applies if you are saving a very specific "pure" variety. You need that many cause it is already in a genetic bottleneck at the get go.


If you get a good mix up of two, preferably more varieties you can greatly reduce that number. I'm even mixing non flour types into my flour corn by detasseling it. For example I have some that is now 1/2 Painted Mountain flour as the mothers and 1/2 a mix of sweets as the fathers. A lot of diversity in these seeds. This year I'm going to detassel it and cross to two more varieties of flour. The result will be 3/4 flour from three varieties and 1/4 from several varieties of sweet. Some of the sweets were modern hybrids and I hope some of the  disease resistance and other good traits they may have is preserved in my new flour corn.  

If I understand correctly just two or three ears of this years crop would be enough to start selecting a new variety but I hope to have many more than that. Enough that the issue of genetic depression is permanently eliminated in my crop. 

[oxbowfarm]

In terms of hominy, most of the "hominy" available as grits or whole hominy in the US is made from white dent varieties. I'm pretty sure most of the dried posole is dent as well. I suspect that is mainly because dent is way easier to mechanically harvest and process without so much damage to the grain, flour corn is pretty soft and fragile by comparison. Dent also makes really fantastic hominy/posole anyway.

In terms of cooking time, flints and dents take longer to boil up than flour corn, but I typically make hominy by cooking the corn with the lye for 20 or 30 minutes or so, till the pericarp slips, and then I leave it to soak for 8-24 hours. By that time, the corn is fully nixtamalized, and its also fairly well hydrated even if its a flint. I then rub and rinse off the pericarps, cob tips etc, and boil it to a good texture.

I guess it depends on your cooking method, but I haven't had any problems with nixtamalizing mixed populations of variable starch types in my corns, there are lots of flinty ancestors in my flour grex, and floury and denty ancestors in my flint grex. It doesn't matter.

[Deleted]

Speaking of o'odham 60 day flour corn. Would it be pretty ill suited to the humid southeast? I,ve always been scared away from Native seed search for that reason. Just thinking I could get a short season corn in after some Edamame down here. I should have maybe 75 or 80 frost free days left after harvesting them.

[oxbowfarm]

I have never grown the o'odham corn, but I had some amazing success with a very short season Tarahumara flint corn last year, it had great resistance to Northern Leaf Blight. Why a desert adapted corn would have such nice fungal disease resistance I don't understand. I'd personally try the corn and see, there's no real knowing till you try it.

[Deleted]

How many days did the tarahumara flint take for you? And when crossing a flint and flour is it similar to a flour and dent? It's either coming out flour or a flint flour hybrid?

[walt]

When crossing flint and flour, the F1 seed is flint, no matter which way the cross was made.  F2 flour selected seeds will pretty much breed true.  The flint F2 seeds will still be mixed in the F3, though the proportion of flint will continue to increase as long as you keep discarding the flour seeds.