Awesome gardening! I love how you concentrate on growing a few crops and make effort to get a lot of diversity.
I’ve planted a popcorn grex (of 4) a km from my flour corn grex and a grex of beautiful but useless ones 7 km further on. I think to get more pollen donated from farmers growing it for cows than that they’ll interfere with each other.
I have taken some pollen stalks if they’re called that and by hand dusted the stamen of others nearby. I have hung those stalks kind of in them, waiting for another batch of pollen to arrive. Do you aid cross pollination?
Thank you for the warm words Hugo. I didn’t do anything to aid pollination for the corn apart from planting more of it this year. I was considering removing the male flowers on the plants coming from my last year’s seed as as there probably is some flour corn crossed into them but I am now away from the garden for two weeks and it might be too late.
I planted a small bed of flour corn in my other garden in the hills. There is a big field of corn in the village, but my flour corn was planted so late (on the 1st of June), that I hope the pollen from the field corn will be gone by the time my flour corn silks out.
Now back to finishing the story of the fava beans.
Your Fava are amazing I sowed mine in February in Croatia and they were attacked by all kinds of animals (after they survived slugs last season), so I got a little harvest of favas this season, but I will add more genetics and put them in the ground end of the year as Cathy suggested for her friend.
Let me know if you will have something to exchange