This CIMMYT flicker photo stream has beautiful photos of corn races from Mexico, about half-way down this page and onto the next page. I found these do a good job at highlighting the visual distinctions, or similarities, between races. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cimmyt/page36
for the sake of sharing my pleasure , here is a picture of some of my corn. I am amazed by the colours, especially since I have no memory of sowing anything looking like that. But last year, I grew various corns groups relatively close.
What do you think these are ?
Those are beautiful! It reminds me of painted hill? I think there’s another highly colorful pop and flint corn as well, something along those lines. It’s like a cob of fruity pebbles cereal. What were the plants like?
plants were shoulder height . help me distinguish which grains are flint / pop
I would thing the more round ones would be pop and the ones that are squeezed flat are flint ? how about those that are half / half ?
I really need to get more knowledgeable with corn identification !
Popcorn and flint is often the hardest corn kernel type, filled with the hardest starch. Dent corn is a mix of hard starch and softer starch in the same kernel. Flour corn is all soft starch. You won’t really know if it is popcorn unless you try popping some. This can be quite fun. I did a bunch of chapalote ears this way, popping about 40 or 50 kernels from each ear and saving the ears that popped best and with the best flavor. These look like either flour or popcorn/flint. This diagram may help.
thank you very much. Very usefull website and chart.
so the key to identification is to cut some of them to see how hard is the interior and/ or to try to pop some.
last picture that amazes me : these grains are big and round and they have a sort of spike . does the spike mean anything about the content of the grain ?
Those look flinty to me. Some flints, like Floriani, have that spiky point on the tip. It definitely isn’t dent. So either flint, flour, or pop. But, since you say it is a diverse population, you can get a mix of different starch types within a single cob. I love the look of these.
I am struggling to identify this corn seed.
Is that because once it is dry, it’s inherently difficult to identify?
-or can someone tell from this picture what kind of corn this is?
