Last year i was lucky enough to have a friend that send me some true morado corn cobs from Peru. These four cobs luckily made it to the Netherlands and so my plan started to hatch on how to produce this crob here in Europe.
Now of course my experience came as a great help, i have been breeding corn for the past 13 years and have produced 2 different stable varieties the Nebula Corn and the Red sangre del sol.
Producing morado corn comes with some challenge, of course being a landrace from Peru its highly adapted to their local tropical climate, the corn needs a lot of heat to grow, it also takes a whooping 180 days to mature. Now you can imagine what challenges i faced trying to grow this beautiful corn here in the Netherlands.
With some trial and error i managed to produce a small test batch of the corn, but this year im going to take the challenge one step further. Im going to try to cross breed this amazing corn with my own sangre del sol and produce a more suitable corn for the European continent and climate. This means i have to sinc the flowering stage, and try some new techniques for the storage of the corn pollen.
To be honest im just curious what the Genetics for this amazing corn van throw into the mix for future landrace development.
Good luck thomas, I will follow your progress with great interest. HOw do you plan to try and synchronize the flowering ? will you sow your sangre del sol in multiple series so as to try and have one of the series at the right moment ?
The exact opposite, i will plant the morado 15 at the time with 10 days between them. That way i hope to have pollen in storage and fresh at the time the Sangre del Sol is at its peak of fertility.
I first had the plan to make the cross two ways, but after seeing how long it takes i have decided to only use the morado as a pollen parent. Of course the Sangre del Sol is highly selected to thrive in my Local climate over the last 13 years, that way i know the crop wil mature in time before the forst gets here.
Nice experiment Thomas. There were Peruvians at the Sow your Resistance conference in Antibes this year. They brought these varieties with them.
Don’t know what they are or if they’re interesting to you, but if you need something, do ask. This is a helpful community.
I’ve exchanged some for favas and beans. I gave them to @stephane_rave to try.
The farmer in the stand told me that fava originate in Europe but they have more variety now over there because they cherish it whenever they find it.
World’s to win.
I’ve read that on the Andes and in the Andes lowlands they have a lot of diverse biotopes. From tropical jungle, to mountain forest and even above the treeline people have been adapting their crops for thousands of years to incredible difficult and diverse environments. So much so that potatoes from different spots combined contained most of the human diets necessities. The king of Spain was very impressed by the Andissean people’s strength and imported the potato and kept it secret for over a century to feed it to the Catholic army as a superfood to fight the protestant northern armies.
Where about you live in Holland? I’m Dutch too btw. If you care about meeting dutch breeders I’d advice to do a proper 'hello from Holland" or something in the introduction section.
Hugo gave me some Peruvian corn. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to grow them until seeds in my climate of central france.
So I planned the following strategy to try:
sow them now in pot in cold greenhouse
sow Painted Mountain (very early) every 15 days to try to make some coincide with the Peruvian corn
take the pollen from Peruvian corn put it on Painted Mountain
if at the time of the male flowering of the Peruvian corn, I haven’t not ready female flower of Painted Mountain I plan to freeze the male blossoms of the Peruvian corn to put them after on Painted Moutain.
Above corn seed is the first round that got planted today (Mediterranean climate here), and hose beauties have a spot in the middle of other various populations - my own F2 grex, painted mountain, few other diverse grexes, a landrace…
Hope I’ll have some success growing plants from Peruvian seeds - both getting some more seeds and cross-pollinating with other populations. I’m going with this tactic due to small amount of seeds I’m starting with and not that much space available in my garden.
My worries are completely opposite of yours - summers with too much heat and not enough of rain, combined with our shallow soils on the rock and occasional dessicating hot winds can be a bit too much. Add in an increase in grasshoper/locust population for the last 3 years… I’ll try to be more attentive to those particular plants so we’ll see
In Antibes I also got some maiz morado seeds from Ecuador and it’s good to know they need 180 days to maturity. I’m seriously considering leaving them aside for next year, I’ll be able to pay more attention to it.
be careful the life of corn seeds is only 2 years…so if your Morado already has one year, it would be more sure to make it sprouted this year!
and yes always more work…
(upper left corner in the photo)
and it’s good to know they need 180 days to maturity. I’m seriously considering leaving them aside for next year, I’ll be able to pay more attention to it.
