As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
TL was laughing at me the other day in my great enjoyment of corn. I call it my CORN PORN, as most people are surfing porn, but I instead surf corn. I simply enjoy reading the genetics, the breeding and the evolution of corn, as it fascinates me in how such absolute sh*t that the Indians had, could be gathered up by Americans without any education, and only God given common sense, and men like Reid, Will and Funk, created what is the agricultural industry of the world in genetics.
Americans should be proud of our breeders, who really never got rich and now are mostly all forgotten in all of their work from gardens and fields.
People think of corn as that yellow stuff, but corn was originally only yellow in a very small segment of cultivation. In fact most corn was not dent corn, but it was flint or flour. There was little sweet corn, which you now know as that sickly sweet milky stuff, but in the beginning it was red, black, white, striped etc... Corn was a fascinating thing, which had different flavors and uses.
When I look at corn, I simply do not understand in why Americans started raising those damned soybeans for oil mean to sell to Asia, when many of the flint corns were quite high in oil, and as we all used to use corn oil, it means that corn indeed was a platform on which the world could have had nutritious bi products, along with the oil from the corn.
Corn is one of thee most remarkable plants ever produced by God, for it comes in flour, sugar, pop, oil, flint, dent and you can do almost anything with it, except put an engine on it and fly it. It is why I simply call it my Porn as I study it and ponder it. I think of the people of the northwest in Ohio planting crops in the spring of flint corn and leaving them all summer, and coming to the autumn to harvest, without doing anything.
It was almost 50 years in the Ohio country after the Revolution before wheat became a crop grown in those lands, because of the forests, famine and yes, because the people were too busy fighting wars and trying to survive, so corn was their staff of life, along with turnips and potatoes. This is what kept Americans pioneers alive, and it was all rooted in pretty corns which dazzled the eyes, as each ear was different in husking it. It was not an issue of all corn was yellow.
It seems that yellow corn, was pleasant to look at, and it was sweet at one time. Reid appears the progenitor of the long season yellow dent corn, which then appeared in some form in Minnesota and Dakota Territory, in being improved. Somewhere in this region there appears to have been some type of Indian corn of this genus which captured enterprising farmer's attention, and from this small group arose what we know as yellow corn.
Oscar Will gives a hint in Northwestern Red in how the progression took place, for he noted a farmer had obtained seed from a red corn in the east, and planted it by Bismark North Dakota and enough ears matured, that Will purchased it, and from this came the earliest of the corn types.
It seems impossible that a plant of 120 days in the east in several plantings could become a 90 day corn in the west, simply by natural selection, and yet that is the dynamic of corn.
Not all corn is wonderful. The Mandan Bride is really a shitty corn, as it does not take wet autumns and will rot on the stalk as the stalk falls over and rots. The ears are upright and capture rain, causing sprouting. It explains in part why Oscar Will never offered the Mandan corns in Nuetta etc..., because they never were the great production corns. Somewhere in Will's collection is an Orchard Baby, a very short and small eared, sweet corn which is very sweet. These early pioneers were such driven people, that God only knows where they found their seeds, as they were all over the country in every wilderness area looking for some undiscovered crop.
There are corns in the USDA collections which will never be grown out, which hold some genetics which anyone could improve upon with 20 years of natural selection. I am far too busy now for that and do not have the money or the land. I simply am thrilled that I believe I am close to the holy grail in having found several corns from the Oscar Will collection which might be my salvation from those corn belt corns which do not like my area.
There is a reason I focus on that region of America in the North Great Plains, as much as I focus on the Hungarian Plains of Europe, and that is, it is a harsh region, and just about anything that survives there will be prolific in most other areas from my experience. I simply enjoy studying corn as my relaxation, as in watering some squash today I was interested in a mystery corn I am growing out that is the one I am hoping solves all, in it had a secondary set of roots on one plant almost 10 inches up on the stalk from ground level, trying to put roots down. What an amazing survival genetic, and if one hilled the corn up high as old cultivation would, this would add to the stability of the plant, plus have a double root system to produce a bigger crop.
None of these old corns are this modern clone frankenfood creations. There is always something getting eaten by a bug or turning out some amazing quality I have never observed before which I will have to focus upon as it is important.
My mystery corn is supposed to be 6 to 7 feet tall. It is instead 9 to 10 feet tall, with numbers of ears 6 feet off the ground. It loves goat shit as all corn does. I will never fully understand what this variety will do until I grow it out for at least 3 years and it goes through drought...which it has and a grasshopper plague which it is doing.
God provides me a crop in this test plot and then I can progress on to the great wonders of what this genus will do. I have decided after reading the old catalogues that this crop is going to be stored on the cob as it keeps better, even if it requires more room.
I was talking to a friend whose wife was born in the middle of nowhere and that family had like 16 kids, and 4 hired kids to work the farms, and he was saying, every spring the father would send the kids out to the cribs to dig out the biggest ears of corn, as that is what they would be planting that year. That is something lost in our convenience now, but corn simply does better stored on the cob than a bag.
I must go back to work now, as my corn porn enjoyment must end for now.
agtG
