I don’t think you would need to send handful out of 2. When you grow separetely you can grow from less seeds and only limitation is climate and which accommondations you make in order to get them at least pollen. It’s up to you and amount of seeds you have if you make harder selection or less hard selection. Diversity in a population isn’t linear. For example, you might have 90% diversity in 10 seeds, 99% in 100 and 99,9% in 1000 (these are just made up numbers, but something like isn’t far from truth). The more you have, the more you are looking for needle in a haystack. If purpose is just add to diversity, you might not need that many to have most of the diversity. When you grow them separately you can do some random pollination from those to increase their amount relative to the number of the plants. I still don’t think it’s that easy for them to just disappear if they are of any use. Another thing to remember is that there is always (approximately) limited amount of genes that you can have in a population (depending on population size ofcourse) so it always goes both ways. If something is really useful in your climate, it doesn’t need many chances to spread through the population like a wildfire.
Amazing results, congratulations!
Brilliant! Very inspiring. Thank you for sharing!
I missed your question in there. I prioritized saving everything that was close enough (late milk, early dough stage) for seed. I only ate the very young cobs that had no chance to mature. Some were early milk stage, and the bulk, minicobs (like the ones you have in Thai food) or full sized but at the blister stage. I even took some with me to the mountains. One afternoon, the canned soup we made was rancid and it was on me to quickly cook up something edible from whatever leftover food we still had. I made a vegetable soup with the last few tomatoes and used the baby corn, including husks and all, as a vegetable, sliced up. It was one of the best soups we’ve eaten during our trip!
My climate is wet wet wet, so stuff that works for many others, such as slicing off a little bit to taste, and/or chopping off most of the cob for eating and leaving the bottom only to mature for seed would result in rotting of the entire thing. Priorities, priorities… I saved all for seed, for now!
I grew up in a corn country. When I was a child I could just walk into a corn field to eat myself full. By the way, I would always eat it raw. It just never made it into the pot. I miss that… I want to be able to do that here, in Sweden. That’s how important corn is for Cathy! And I can say that the immature corn I didn’t save for seed tasted just like it did when I was a child… By the way, in my home country, husks, silks etc are also used. Every part of the corn plant is used in some way. Long story… 
I wanted to insert a summary here. What did I learn from this experiment.
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This perhaps IS the perfect way for me to grow the things here, so I didn’t “cheat” with the manure. Since I don’t like to dig etc, and I will always, at least partially, grow on land I don’t own, because there’s no amount of land that would scale with my grow escalating all the time, even if I were to buy land, I’d want to grow more…, so anyway there will always be situations where I need to do something with land I don’t own, so I don’t want to invest that much, I don’t want to use machinery (ever) to make it suitable for planting… so I need a way to quickly make it suitable for plants, despite perennial weeds and so forth. The easiest way, by far, for me is to put down large amounts of manure and plant into that directly. Technically, I plant into soil pockets in the manure. So, using this much manure is not a cheat. It is the way, my way, to grow what I want, quickly, with min effort. Horse manure I can get, for free, by the truckload. That field took five loads like the one pictured. I can egt ten, twenty such if I want. I did the spreading manually, with a wheelbarrow and a tarp, so I’m not saying it was easy but still easier than dig it up!
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When you grow in manure, you must be able to water initially. It takes sick amounts of water to saturate fresh manure. It’s necessary to saturate it initially, otherwise it just sits there all season long and the plants don’t benefit from it. Nutes need to be in a watery solution for the plants, that is. So I needed to invest into a water pump because it was quite remote but within 90 meters from a river. Doable.
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A thin fleece is gold in a climate like mine. It cuts down on wind, it raises the night temps marginally. My upscaling may hinge on how much fleece I’m able to source and handle. Like Jesse is trying to get rid of the black plastic over time (which I refuse to use…), of course, I will try to take away the fleece. But not now, not initially when I try to get own seed stock, it’s my crutch and possibly the single most important factor that helped me to get some melons I can continue with.
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Corn: heavy tillering is a good thing! It’s a great thing and I will never plant corn so densely that it can’t tiller. Great things happen when a corn tillers. You get multiple cobs even in my shit climate. Also, the plants are much more resistant to lodging. Considering I grow in crazy wind on a fully exposed site, how could I ask for more?…
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Melons and corn worked together beautifully. Corn provided a little windbreak (which the fleece completed later in the season). Considering the corn spacing, it didn’t block the light from the melons. I got the best of both worlds.
Surely there’s more things; these just off the top of my head right now.
- I need to start much earlier! Starting at Midsummer was way, way, way too late, especially since the manure generates, at least initially, some heat which I could exploit. That’s when I got the green light for the land… but next year I plan to start on the 1st of June, or even earlier. Sweet corn I’ll plant staggered, starting with 10deg soil. Then sow some weekly, to find the hardy ones that can germinate in cold soil. Perhaps even start as low as 8C, that’s roughly 20 May, that’s when we plant potatoes, ish….
Those pepos and cukes are on my wish list👌🏻
I wanted to do the same with pepo so lucky for me you did all the hard work already😍
thank you Cathy for all these lessons ! I especially appreciate n°4 about tillering. I realize I probabely plant my corn way too densely… I will do better next year …
Thank you for sharing all these amazing results. It is really wonderful to see such success, and it motivates me for the 2nd year of my experiments 
All the seeds I got from you last year produced quite well, especially the mixed peas. Out of 40 plants 7 or 8 survived moles in the ground, adapted fast and gave more than half a kilo of seeds. They were in so many wonderful colors. They did very well in summer heat, which was quite a surprise, and I was harvesting them even in July.
I would be interested to exchange some melon and cucumber seeds. For us was very poor cucumber season, but I managed to harvest one pickling variety for seeds which produced a lot.
Well done for the sweet corn as well, and I perfectly understand that you want to keep these babies for yourself until you multiply the seeds more times. I would do the same. 
Cathy, last night at my workshop Adaptation gardening people were surprised by the harvest results of members of the European community…but when they saw your melons and cucumbers crops, without a greenhouse and knowing where you live on the north…
I thought I should revive all the gardeners present… 
I’ve got some news, now that it’s final. We’ve found our house — after three years of searching! Moving in some time during this winter. This means I will have access to some ”åkermark” (pastureland), besides my regular community garden plots and my friend’s field where I had the melons, maximas, and the corn.
It will take me quite some time to prepare the new area, considering my refusal to use machinery that compacts the soil. No tractors.
I plan to do the same thing I always do with a new piece of land to break in: cover with horse poop, plant something right away that can grow in manure, mulch, and wait. Year two will be perfect. Now, the amount of horse poop needed to cover even half of this will be a challenge, but I think not entirely impossible.
So, now you’ve seen my plans to scale up! My plan is to grow at multiple locations — in the community garden where I have the best soil by now, after five, six years of no till and lots of organic material added, my friend’s field where I started to prepare last year, and finally, start to prepare at home. Most likely, I will have tons of corn at home, because corn likes manure. Now, my new place is in the middle of the woods, the total area is 1.6 hectares and the rest is forest. That means deer, friends. That will be my greatest challenge, because to erect a tall fence to protect such a large area is not economically viable. We have friends in the village who post regular deer-in-the-backyard pix on their facebook 
There is a tiny greenhouse as well, in the shade of some trees, with several sides and roof broken or missing. We’ll take that down. But in the long term, perhaps we’ll build a more proper greenhouse. Not a prio, though. The prio is to make that field suitable for growing no-dig style.
My growing zone will not change. The microclimate, I hope, will change — for the better. I really hope. Because so far I’ve been growing in a frost pocket, so not even what you read about Luleå has been true. Most importantly, the nights… I’ve been dealing with very cold nights, locally, for six years. Single digit ˚C even in the peak of July. That d@mn place where the community garden is actually isn’t really suited for growing plants at all, other than animal feed…
Now, this new piece of land seems to be perfect. It’s oriented perfectly, it is a bit higher up, so my neighbor will get all the cold air, there’s no reason for it to be colder than its surroundings. Of course, I’ll know that for sure when I start to grow there. But, I’m very hopeful that it will be slightly better for growing stuff than any of the previous locations.
I would suggest building up the walls of that greenhouse, perhaps removing the roof if it’s badly damaged, and making that your first deer-proof gardening area. If the structure is already there, why waste it?
It’s really tiny!
Grattis Cathy! Very happy for you. Sounds like next phase in your growing story.
So happy for you that you have such a promissing land of your own now !!!