As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
Oscar Will is an American businessman who I have featured on this blog previously and I was delighted to discover on Archive.org a series of his catalogues to look through. It is the most wonderful thing to flip through a catalogue with a mouse click and visit an era of 1918 in an America where most varieties of garden fruit have disappeared.
It is eye opening to see an Indian cabin North Dakota, very well made, and with corn drying on the roof in this particular manner. All of this old knowledge is lost as to why they did things the way they did.
One of the most fascinating things for me is Oscar Will's Dakota White, which was a flint corn of his breeding, acquired from North Dakota Indians. I am in the process of seeing what kind of success I will have with this Will variety which is astounding as most claims are from seed companies. It though is very early corn and did last year produce some very long ears which surprised me from the very old seed I had tried.
What was of particular interest to me is in 1918 Will had started selling Minnesota 13, the legendary moonshine corn, but warned his North Dakota customers that it simply would not mature there. It is not that 13 was a long season corn, but that North Dakota had such a short season to produce a crop.
Dakota actually produced corn in Montana highlands by Bozeman, so this variety is remarkable in producing food in areas that were not "corn growing" areas again in hybrids until the past decade.
It gives me pause every time I walk by the old varieties I am trying out, because I know the Indians grew them and Oscar Will, along with other farmers trying to make homesteads work, because it meant not dying literally as there was not any welfare programs to fall back on. The Will varieties of corn allowed farmers to have a bit more variety in raising hogs, dairy and chickens, which required the higher energy corn to fatten on and to survive on in North Dakota 20 to 40 below weather.
I often think of the Crimean Germans from Russia who I watched on a PBS special in the one quote they had, "In Crimea we had fruits and gardens, and in North Dakota all we have is rocks and weeds". Those settlers all they did was cry, but North Dakota is all they had, for the voyage almost killed them and if they went back to Russia, the Czar would throw them all in the army and they would die.
By 1930 their letters stopped to relatives in America for these Germans would all be dead in Stalin genocided those who remained. They told the American Germans, you at least have something in America, for we have nothing in Russia at all.
Fruit never looks this good, nor does anything in North Dakota. It is a harsh land which does not allow for any mistakes. I love though the propaganda of it all, in railroads lured settlers there with promises of trees and changing the environment, and trees grew to shrugs with all the branches worn off on the northwest side from wind.
To look upon though such industry and hope of one man in Oscar Will, who by 1918 was featuring Pioneer brands, which would become one of the most prosperous seed companies in America in hybrids is a glimpse of witnessing America being transformed from a wilderness to a civilization, as the Obama regime has turned America into sodomite barbarians.
The world continues to spin and my collection grows with a corn which has in it the genes to reproduce unlike hybrids and to make a crop through nuclear winters or meteor winters. It is as old as Oscar Will used to ask in his catalogue.
Do you want a crop or do you want stalk when it comes to corn?
agtG
