Sooo my sweet corn is starting to tassel which is very exciting but it led me to the question of how to save good viable corn seed. Is there a percentage of how many cobs you dry per how many plants you grew? For example: for every 50 plants, save 5 cobs? If one corn plant has two ears, do I harvest one to eat and let the other one dry down for the rest of summer, or can I take part of that cob for eating and save the partial cob for seedsaving? Depending on how many cobs I need to keep for seed, it seems like I’d be losing out a good amount of harvestable tasty corn! But I suppose if the seeds stay viable for a few years I may only save seed every other year or something like that…
How does everyone save seed from sweet corn specifically? How many cobs do you save? Flour or popcorn is pretty straight forward since you let the whole plant dry down before harvesting but with the sweet corn I’d like to keep the plant intact for as long as possible for better seed development.
My experience is that even if viability is achieved quite early, the seed will be more vigorous the more time they have to ripen. Even if they germinate fairly good, only smaller percentage seems to emerge and those take longer than those that have had more time to mature. Later they regain the vigour (what genes allow), but it’s not very good for comparing or you get worse impression than warented for seeds that you might have thought came from special plants. I would let them ripen as long as the weather isn’t too wet too long at the later stage of drying so around month from silking.
I agree, the longer it can stay on the stalk to dry down the better. A prematurely dried seed may technically be viable, but the sprout will be less robust, and stored seed will have shorter shelf life.
That depends on how many total you grew and their genetic makeup. In one of her books Carol Deppe writes that corn is one of the crops that suffers most from genetic depression (inbreeding) and the effects of it can be seen in just a couple of seasons. If you are growing an heirloom, then fifty plants aren’t enough regardless of what you do. On the flip side corn is in my opinion probably one of the best and easiest to apply the Lofthouse landrace thing. In fact, it may be the only one a home small home gardener can do it with. It is very easy let multiple varieties mix themselves and very easy to purposely control the crosses if you want to. Get as many kinds as you can and plant them intermixed so that most of your seed is hybrid and in following years you can get by with less that the 200 recommended plants needed to preserve an heirloom and you can get by with saving seed from just your favorites.
I think that if a plant has more than one cob, it’s fine to eat one and save another.
Joseph Lofthouse reports that he opens a cob to taste and leaves the rest to dry for seed. In my climate if you open the husk on an ear of corn at eating stage and leave the rest you end up with a husk full of bug poop and mold so that might be a function of humidity and bug population.
My sweet corn is very mixed up and I grow small patches but most all of it produces at least two cobs per stalk so I’m able to evaluate individual plants by eating one. Even though it is mixed up I still like to save seed from at least twenty plants and I keep seed going back three or four years to plant with the new seed. Multiple generations intermixing each year, what Alan Kalupler called a grex.
Sweet corn is harder than flour, flint or pop because you want to have something to eat and that means you have less seed to select from, but you can do it. The landrace thing works well for corn.
I grow about 40 plants in an intentionally mixed population. I’ve been adding about 10% unrelated (commercial or traded) seed each year as extra insurance against inbreeding.
Especially in the early years of landracing (when there were quite a few duds), I routinely cut off the top 2/3 of the cob to eat, then tied a string around the husk to close it up to keep the worms out. In my climate, I’ve found that I have far less worm pressure on the first planting than the second, so I only save seed from the first. (Apologies to everyone who barely has enough season for one crop.)
This year, I saved 5 whole ears for seed. I was planning 4, but I discovered a past-prime ear that had been missed. I tie a ribbon around ears for saving so I know not to pick them. I will split the seed 3 ways: next year’s seed, return to Going to Seed, and contribution to the local seed library.
Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who answered the questions! This will be our first time saving seed from sweet corn and we’ve only grown sweet corn ourselves a couple times so I had a lot of the same questions. About half of what we planted was GTS and the GTS seed is definitely outperforming all our others! It’s fun to see!