We have the crop from our first season and are seeing all sorts of shapes and qualities in the resulting fruits. I’m curious what’s going on? We mixed 9 varieties of corn from 13 locations and the resulting fruits are rather misshapen. poor pollination was a major issue and I’m curious what may be happening with the kernels that have an apparent white deposit in them? We included a superset corn in the grex which I’ve just learned may be the cause for us experiencing an apparent contamination of hard kernels in amongst the shrivelled (sweet) ones. I’m curious to know why we may have so many misshapen kernels too? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
sh2 (supersweet, aka shruken)–sweeter and more wrinkled than su
se (sugar enhanced)–The se mixed with su enhances the sweetness of su types
All of the genes for sweetness are recessive, while the corresponding genes for field corn are dominant.
The genes for su sweetness and sh2 sweetness are different, in different loci. If su and sh2 pollinate each other, then they end up as field corn, because they are contributing a dominate (non-sweet) gene to the other’s loci for sweetness. (Paraphrased from Carol Deppe’s “Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties” Appendix A)
As a side note, the only Open-Pollinated se (sugar enhanced) variety that I’m aware of is Candy Mountain.
A few years ago, I set out to grow a sweet corn landrace. I mixed together about 20 heirloom varieties and planted them in rows together. Then I detasseled approximately every 3rd row and marked those rows for seed saving (the other rows for fresh eating)–so that I would not be saving any seed that resulted from self-pollination. It was all going very well… until a racoon (family?) figured out how to scale my 6-foot fence and ate every. Last. Ear. I still haven’t worked up the gumption to try growing sweet corn again.
Just a heads up @TheGourmetGardener . It’s supersweet, not superset. Rachel has explained how the combo ends up with non-sweet kernels. Sorry, I should have explained this in the other thread.
I suspect you’ll be pulling out non-sweet kernels for a while because you will have saved the selfed DotS kernels (they will all be wrinkled). You could plant more of the non-supersweet parents, i.e., any except DotS, in with the next generation to dilute the effects. Just a suggestion.
Joseph Lofthouse has provided a more in depth protocol for reducing the effects of the su/sh2 combo. As he pointed out, you’ll likely never be rid of it entirely but you can reduce its impact to negligible levels.
An alternative would be to start again without DotS or any other supersweet type. If you were concerned about diversity there are non-sweet corns (flint types probably the best choice) you can introduce. With a little planning the effects of the non-sweets can be removed in year two simply by removing all non-sweet kernels.
Happy to chat with you over the phone if you’d like more info on this. Just pm me.
Wow, thanks Ray, I REALLY appreciate your input here! And thanks for your suggestions! I might just take you up on that phone call! I’m overseas at the mo, I’ll organise something with you when I get back!
