My corn

[rockcanyon]

I've been harvesting my corn for the past couple of weeks. It's all by hand, my hand specifically - the pulling, the shucking, the hanging to dry. (as well as the planting and hoeing). It's been an every day task since early April but it's given me something to do and kept me sane during Covid. Looking forward to turning it into something good thanks to the info and help on this forum BTW this is just part of it. I've got it hanging all over my carport. This corn is the result of an experiment I started 7 years ago.

[8Ball]

Wow. That looks promising! Good job. I’d pick a tried and true recipe to use it with until I figured out my own style. My vote is to go with an all grain and then do a piggy-back sugarhead - win, win.

[WithOrWithoutU2]

Good on you!

I hope you keep us in the loop as you progress to drinking that corn.

[Jr-dist]

Cool, what are you trying to achieve with the experiment? Playing with corn genetics is fun.

[rockcanyon]

8Ball thanks for the suggestion about the sugarhead, definitely will do that!

[rockcanyon]

The corn experiment - in 2014 I bought 17 varieties of heirloom corns. My intent was to cross pollinate by hand various ones with significantly different ones to see what unusual outcomes it might produce. The first year's results were interesting at least to me, but even more interesting were the unintended crosses that were happening all over the corn patch because all these varieties were growing adjacent to each other. So in succeeding seasons I've just let it run amuck and selected from each year's harvest which ones to plant the following year, such as biggest, most colorful, most unusual, tightest husk, etc. Maybe I'm just easily amused

[Jr-dist]

Your getting lots odd hybrids and eventually narrowing the gene pool down. Next year if you really want to see what your getting take a row or two and inbreed them. You do this by putting a paper bag around the tassels and another bag around the ears. You take the pollen from the tassel bag and put it on that plants own silks. Then cover silks up again. When you plant the resulting seeds from this cross you will end up with some plants that are terrible. Remove them from the gene pool. Seed companies do this for 5 years in a row to develop a pure line for a trait they want in the seed. For you a couple years of this would intensify your traits and cull for those you dont want quicker.

[jonnys_spirit]

How much did you grow/Harvest? Sounds fun!

Cheers,
Jonny

[rockcanyon]

Jr-dist - Thanks for the input. Every year I plant 50% of my corn without selecting for anything special, just to keep the gene pool robust. I became more interested in the random hybridization that was going on simply because there's hugely more of that going on than I could ever do by hand.
I have given some thought to "selfing" some of my more successful ones to "fix" the traits but haven't acted on it yet because I'm already doing that with several okras I'm developing. Gotta draw the line somewhere with how many projects I can do. Maybe start next year...

[Jr-dist]

Cool good luck and if you decide to selfie some corn make sure to let us know how it turns out

[rockcanyon]

How much did you grow/Harvest? Sounds fun!

Cheers,
Jonny

It's just a big garden. Based on my seed spacing it works out to be about 4000 corn plants. I just established the plot last spring in a former cow pasture but I sold the cows last year. There's several more acres there that I could plant if I feel like doing that much work. Might have to increase my plot size now that I'm exploring this new hobby