Greenie/Erin DeS
Julia’s atomic orange corn that she sent me came with some bonus diversity, including some beautiful lavenders. I wonder how the genetics for that works, how do you get a lavender seed out of orange mother plants?
Julia Dakin
well… maybe you don’t 
There were some light colored kernels and reds plus the oranges, but the lavender comes from a few Mandan Parching lavender that also matured a few cobs and I mixed them in Mandan Parching Lavender Corn (Organic) - Adaptive Seeds
Greenie/Erin DeS
Aha, that explains that! I tried mandan parching lavender last year (from adaptive!) and it tillered like mad and didn’t ripen enough, but passed a tiny tiny bit of pollen into my magic manna beside it. This year I’m going to try again and make sure it’s in full sun, it had a touch of an east/light morning shade last year. Was yours also very short and tillery?
Greenie/Erin DeS
I would enjoy some sort of in-depth resource about corn colours. We got that overview on the endosperm, aleurone, and pericarp but I still don’t fully understand how that that impacts the different colours and how patterns are inherited. I think there was some in one of Carol Deppe’s books, but not about patterning.
Mark Reed
The pericarp is maternal tissue, so it is the same an all kernels of all ears of a plant. It is variable to some degree because of transposons, or jumping genes but you will have to ask Carol or maybe Joseph for more in-depth explanation of that. I have not observed it myself except with pericarp exhibiting the chin mark pattern.
Chinmark is the little streaks of color that some kernels have. Chin marking is the only pericarp pattern that I am aware of and a chinmark ear very often has some variation in the pericarp. They all have the chinmark it is just more pronounced on some kernels than others. Look up some images of Carol’s Starburst Manna to see what it looks like.
Endosperm with perhaps some possible exceptions, again you’ll need to ask Joseph about the exceptions, is pretty much always some shade of yellow, or white.
Aleurone is where all the different shades of blue, purple, and sometimes pink-ish shows up. Like endosperm it is influenced by both the mother and father and in my experience is all kinds of variable and unpredictable. Since it is influenced by both parents its variability shows up on different kernels of the same ear. Or, especially if it was selected for that one possible variation might be uniformity on the same ear.
Now it gets even more fun. Pericarp, whatever color it is can be completely transparent, translucent or completely opaque. I’m fairly sure aleurone can be also.
Think of a modern bi-color sweet corn. Endosperm is variable, pericarp and aleurone are colorless and transparent so you get white/yellow ears. Now leave the pericarp colorless but add in a uniform light blue aleurone and all of a sudden you got a green (blue over yellow) / blue (blue over white) and your white/yellow bicolor is now a green/blue bicolor. Or leave the aleurone colorless but add a light red transparent pericarp, poof a light red (over white) / darker red (over yellow) bicolor.
In my experience, when the aleurone gets all mixed up, as it will anytime you plant seeds from an ear with more than two distinct colors all bets are off on what you will get as far as color.
I like the looks of Carol’s Manna and Cascade corns and want mine to be that way too, so I select strongly against color in the aleurone.
Greenie/Erin DeS
Thank you so much for all this! The kernels I picked out were: white or yellow with blue speckles, white with a big blue eagle, various reds, oranges, and deep reds with starburst patterns. Are those all the same, chinmark on the pericarp? Are they all different alleles on the same gene, or are they stackable?
Magic manna grew ok for me but starburst manna grew spectacularly, I have a bunch of it and am looking forward to what it does this year. It really is gorgeous.
Does this mean if the endosperm was yellow & white, the aleurone was blue, and the pericarp had a dark chinmark on it, one could have green & blue bicolour with dark starbursts or spots on them? Oh my.
Very curious to see what comes out of all this. I did pull out those 80 favourites from painted mountain the other day to mix into Morden-- morden is white and floury, so it will be a good foil. Guess I need to figure out what its pericarp is.
Ray South
how does one go about selecting for a clear aleurone? Finding it difficult to get my head around this.
Mark Reed
First, when I said aleurone could be clear or transparent, thinking about that, I’m not 100% sure it’s true. It might be that it is about always transparent or translucent, and that how easy it is to see through just depends on how dark the color is.
I have searched but found little about how pericarp or aleurone color is inherited. Dominate or recessive, I don’t know. Joseph says concerning aleurone there is more than one gene involved, one to make the color, one to decide where in the plant it shows up, seeds, leaves, tassels??
Although I don’t know how it’s inherited or how many genes are involved it seems to me that pericarp is pretty straight forward. If you plant seeds with a variety, you keep getting a variety. It ranges from colorless to pink to dark red, brown, tan or chinmark. In my flint project I suspect it will be a few more years before I know for sure if one or another shows up more often than others but seems like darker reds and orange are most common. Carol’s Manna and Cascade series seem to indicate that reds might be most common, but I added in that Bronze Beauty with tan and browns, so who knows. I don’t know if know if different genes are involved for the different colors or if that trait is just variable from the same gene(s). I do think that the chinmark pattern might be from separate gene(s) because, though it’s most common on red, I’ve also seen it on brown and pink now, not just red.
I’m pretty sure that blues, purples in various shades with or without spots or other patterns always comes from the aleurone. The only pericarp pattern that I know of is the chinmark. Generally, blue/purple color is aleurone, reds/brown is pericarp. BUT since you are looking through the layers of various colors of various shades it can get really hard to know what’s really going on.
In mine I’m happy letting the pericarp settle into whatever it wants but I don’t want aleurone color at all. Fortunately, the northern flints, the Mexican landrace, the modern and heirloom sweets and Carol’s Cascade all lacked aleurone color from the start.
There is a bit of aleurone color still lurking in mine from the western flour corns I included back at the start. I thought I had eliminated it completely but last year a single ear with a light pink pericarp showed up with five off color kernels. Peeling the pericarp off revealed a light blue aleurone. So, aleurone color can lurk around and then pop out by surprise. It must be recessive and or gene combination or who knows what. I culled the whole ear, not just the off-color kernels.
Because those western corns like Painted Mountain and Hopi were in my original landraces I’ve had to select against anything with a hint of blue or any multi-colored ears. I still have both white and yellow endosperm so an ear with two shades is Ok because it is just the endosperm showing through the pericarp. If an ear has more than two shades, I assume aleurone color is involved and cull the entire ear.
The easiest way to eliminate aleurone color would be not to plant it in the first place. If you do that though you might miss some other nice traits, like the drought tolerance of those western flour corns.
One variety of my new popcorn project has some aleurone color but also some other traits I like. My first step with it will be to de-tassel it and cross to the others. Next year I’ll do the same with its F1 seeds and probably for another couple years after that. Eventually, I think just by doing that the aleurone color should go away.
Just selecting against aleurone color seems, over time to get rid of it. Selecting for mixed up aleurone color would be easy, you wouldn’t have to do much of anything.
Selecting for a specific and uniform aleurone color or pattern, I think might be very difficult, unless you were willing to trade off otherwise wide diversity in your landrace.
Greenie/Erin DeS
I appreciate your responses and generosity with your knowledge so much.
This fall when my seed is in I suspect I’ll find the courage to cut into all the kernels and see if I can distinguish layers.
Ray South
Thank you Mark. I do like the look of those single colour cobs in some of Carol Deppe’s corns but given my very limited knowledge and inexperience with corn I’ll stick to selecting from the yellow - orange - red colour palette in my polenta corn project and ignore uniform cobs for the time being.
Mark Reed
If you are dealing with just red, yellow, orange you probably already don’t have any aleurone color. Different shades of those colors can be just from variations of the pericarp. Different shades of those colors on the same ear (as long as there are not more than two shades) are probably just the difference between white or yellow endosperm showing through. Although yellow endosperm color can also vary in intensity.
If you ever what ears of uniform color, you have to standardize the endosperm. That’s easy if you want white because it is recessive. You know that any white endosperm kernel got its white genes from both parents and only carries white genes. No matter how many seeds from how many plants, if they are all white, all offspring will be white.
But yellow is dominate so if you started with a mix, the white could be hiding in any seed and if it happens to match up with another white, even generations later the offspring will be white. I know a fellow who has been trying for years to get rid of white endosperm.
I like white endosperm, so I’m not worried about eliminating yellow right now. Anytime I want I too, in just one season, I can easily eliminate yellow just by not planting any. I haven’t done so yet on the off chance the yellow endosperm kernels might be carrying some other traits that I want to keep.
Carol talks about uniform pericarp in different colors having different flavors. I’ve found that to be true, it’s largely why I want my flint corn to have uniformly colored ears. Plus, I just like the way it looks.
Ray South
We have very limited access to corn varieties here in Australia as we cannot import corn. So, for diversity’s sake I’m having to start with very little yellow endosperm though that is my ultimate goal. I don’t need to eliminate it, just have it in the minority.
This coming season is the first for me so this year a focus will be learning what tassels when so that next year I can do a decent job of ensuring good cross pollination.
Megan Grinwald
I am very interested in your very northern adapted corn. I am on the lookout for Gaspe to try this year now. Seems to be tough to find commercially in the USA - so thanks for the hunt!
Hoping to have another huge planting week now that our nighttime temps are finally catching up to above freezing. Corn, peanuts, soybeans, tomatoes, peppers, sorghums, millets, marigolds, and more, all going in this week. Transplants and directs.
I’m very excited. 
Greenie/Erin DeS
It’s very, very short; roughly knee-high. It needs to be planted pretty close for pollination because it’s so tiny. The first year I did it on a 1-foot grid and that was too far. The second year I did 2 seeds every 9 inches, in 12" rows, and that worked but I want to play with it. Will likely do a 6" x 12" or 9" x 9" grid this year. It might grow a little bigger for you down there.
Gaspe is such a heart corn. It’s that ragged edge of corn’s ability, pushing the absolute limit of adaptation, and it’s the result of so so so many generations of thoughtful stewards.
I planted May 26 and harvested Sept 7 last year and it was well on its way to dry. I expect it’ll take 2/3 of that in your summer heat. Report back!
I may have found another source for Gaspe up here that’s not linked to the Sherck/GLSS gene pools!
Greenie/Erin DeS
2022-06-06T07:00:00Z
Half of this is in the ground, the other half will be tonight. I will admit to spending a lot of time just admiring the seeds.
I’m also working with some flour corns.
And I’m trialling four sources of Painted Mountain against each other, and selecting of course.
Greenie/Erin DeS
2022-10-02T07:00:00Z
Alright, lots of updates on this one. The long and short:
Crows took about half of the seeds after they sprouted, leaving me with plants from:
oaxacan green, montana morado, early riser, magic manna, painted mountain glorious organics and painted mountain sweet rock (the painted mountain salt spring sprouted first and was thus eaten first, the annapolis painted mountan was in a place that could not be covered), new york red, homestead yellow, open oak party, cascade ruby gold, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, atomic orange, assiniboine flint, morden and gaspe
I had many fewer individuals of most of these than expected. The only one the crows didn’t touch was saskatoon white. I covered the rest for a couple weeks until the crows got bored and went away, but didn’t manage to cover all the plants.
It was a very cold long spring and thus a short summer for us. Out first frost was roughly Sept 8 and we had about fifty days where the daytime temperature got above 18-20C; the night temperature never was above 15C but was higher than usual at 10-11C.
I also ended up planting late (mid-June) due to issues including a rototiller late delivery, stepping on a nail, and sitting up in the cornfield with a gun for the crows. It was quite a spring!
I planted gaspe in two waves instead of the once-per-week I was planning. The first wave ripened good and hard before frost, though the husks didn’t go brown, and mostly was done before anything else dropped pollen.
The second gaspe pollinated with some overlap with, in decreasing order, saskatchewan rainbow, atomic orange, morden, saskatoon white, painted mountain, cascade ruby gold and I hand-carried a bunch of pollen around to ensure some good crossing in all of these.
The second gaspe, saskatchewan rainbow, some atomic orange, a few cascade ruby gold, a few painted mountain, the limited number of morden plants I had, a few magic manna, and some saskatoon white managed to ripen seed. Saskatchewan rainbow, morden, and gaspe were the only really solid ones in that regard.
Many of my crossed cobs are showing evidence of crosses; saskatchewan rainbow seems to have been a very prolific pollen parent with lots of blue and blue speckling showing up from its crosses, especially in the nearby morden and second gaspe patches.
Now that I’ve narrowed the field and captured some pollen, I have a better sense of how to focus next year. Definitely I’ll have a patch for my crossed morden, for my crossed gaspe, for my crossed saskatchewan rainbow, for the crossed atomic orange, and probably an “everything else” patch or two, one sorted for flint and one for flour. I’ll also be growing a patch of pure gaspe, time-offset from all the grexing; I won’t mind if anything else crosses.
I may also plant some montana morado indoors in order to start it early and get a pure cross between it and gaspe, I think that would be fun. It was off on the end of the garden and got no water, it might have been more similar to painted mountain in timing if it had been watered.
I expect that I can get everything in roughly a month to three weeks earlier next year, and that will likely make a big difference.
Pictures to come when the cobs are finished drying and I start to pull seeds.
I remain firmly in love with gaspe, newly in love with saskatchewan rainbow, and very excited about this project.
I’d also really like to try lavender mandan again, the first time I tried it, it was in the shade and didn’t ripen. The second time the crows ate every bit.
I’ll also have some extra seed from many of my way-too-late corns, including early riser, new york red, open oak party, and homestead yellow, that I had retained from last year and likely won’t be using again. I’ll send that into the landrace seed pool/have it for swapping.
