Has anyone tried eating or popping Gamagrass seeds (Tripsacum dactyloides)?
Gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides) is a very close relative of Popcorn (Zea mays) and the wild teosinte can be popped like popcorn.
According to theferns (Tripsacum dactyloides - Useful Temperate Plants), the seeds are “The popped seed is almost indistinguishable from strawberry popcorn”. EatTheWeeds also says they’re edible (Eastern Gamagrass - Eat The Weeds and other things, too), “From our point of view the edible part is a tough yellow grain. Whether it can be used for flour depends upon availability. Left unmilled the grains will pop like Strawberry Popcorn. They can also be cooked whole like wheatberries or made into a gruel.” Has anyone actually tested this recently?
It seems like every source has been copying the same 60 year old observation by a fire ecologist but has anyone actually tested this recently? It would be important to know the popping quality of the default Gamagrass without any Popcorn genetics to help it out. Popping actually needs to be tested, perhaps it also pops in like parched cornnuts? The shell is pretty hard.
As for the phylogeny, you can see Zea & Tripsacum are sister genera. Note that hybrids between Zea x Tripsacum hybrids are possible (it Forms the new hybrid genus ×Tripsazea).
Here’s what the Gamagrass x Corn Hybrids look like (The letters on the bottom key : M = Z. mays. T = T. dactyloides. P = Z. perennis. MTP = the 3 species hybrid) - https://academic.oup.com/g3journal/article/10/2/839/6026317?login=false
It would be awesome to breed a cold hardy temperate adapted Perennial Popcorn with great popping quality! That’s the goal but also introduce valuable disease resistance & cold hardiness to Zea as well. There are also other Tripsacum species but it seems like Tripsacum dactyloides is the best one most suited to our needs + it’s the most common species also.
Gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides) as a plant have so many things going for it
- It’s a Warm-Season Evergreen Perennial Clump-forming Grass (can live 50-years), does best in Full Sun but tolerates light shade.
- Hardiness zones 6-11 (zone 5 if pushed or depending on variety). Plants can survive temperatures as low as -30 °C, but require at least 140 frost free days/year for longer-term persistence (Tops burnt by heavy frost & recommencing growth in early spring).
- Seeds require moist stratification (exposure to moisture + cool temps) in order to germinate (hard seedcoats delay germination). Fresh seeds have high dormancy that can be broken by pre-chilling the seed at 5‒10C for 8‒10 weeks (a process that happens naturally in colder areas with freezing and thawing). Untreated seeds can be sown mid to late winter once soil temps fall below 10C (They’ll germinate after winter when soil temps reach 16‒18C). Depending on where you live & your environmental conditions this is either a good trait or a bad trait, for direct seed sowing this trait may allow germination of corn/gamagrass in cooler wetter soils (Either way, its genetics could help make corn more capable of germinating in cooler soils).
- Because the plants are perennial, they can be propagated by dividing root mass of larger plants.
The good news is, while doing some wild edible foraging I found some Gamagrass & managed to harvest some seeds. Granted they were a bit green when I picked them but I’m hoping they ripen as they dry. I might revisit the same place to find ripe seeds (but birds might beat me to them).
These are the seeds I’m drying right now to test this popping ability of Gamagrass (wet seeds won’t make a fair popping test).