personally i am convinced by all the reading i've done that teosinte is an ancestor of maize...it may not be the only one, there is some dispute about that, and that is why we included eastern gamagrass in our garden, but teosinte has me sold...the top photo is Zea mexicana growing ( with a lot of luck, even though i did plant the seeds...nature surely did the work) on the south side of my house...the next one down is Zea mays growing down county line road..take a look and tell me.
the second set of photos shows how the maize leaves all branch out from the center of the stalk..they form one above the other emerging from the center as the plant grows...now take a look at the teosinte...same growth mechanism at work...as the plant grows the leaves emerge from the center thickening the stalk as new leaves are created...a family trait.
there are differences...in the top photo you can just make out leaves emerging from the base of the plant as well...called tillers they are what i surmise to be the beginnings of the branches that mature teosinte plants exhibit...i have lived mostly in the mid-west all my life and none of the thousands of maize plants i've seen had branches...teosinte isn't very sociable either..all the planting directions i've read reccomend at least three feet between plants in all directions...the domesticated and branchless maize could be planted a bit closer, but not too close...in Native American Gardening [wilson 1917] Buffalobird-Woman says, "if the corn hills were so close together that the plants, when they grew up, touched each other, we called them 'smell-each-other'; and we knew that the ears they bore would not be plump nor large." p23...a lot of the modification of transgenetic maize by big seed producers like monsanto has gone into producing plants that will tolerate living closely to one another and still produce...a seperation of one foot is the norm , unless the mechanical planter skips and then you get two feet.
related but different in substantial ways, maize is the result of artificial selection over many generations and an accelerated genetic modification over the last few decades....the morphology is plain to see
Hi, I've seen you are able to grow teosinte!
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm trying to germinate teosinte seeds I collected last november (2010) in mexico but only the 10% of my seed has germinated. It's a bit tricky because I planted teosinte seeds collected 2 years ago and the 100% of them germinated without any problem.
I've heard teosinte seeds have a period of dormancy. Do you know how to remove this stage? Could be soaking the seeds in oxygen peroxide? Do you know at what concentration and for how long?
I will appreciate any comment and help. Thanks a lot!
when i germinated the teosinte in paper towels in baggies i first soaked them in hydrogen peroxide for exactly twenty minutes to break dormancy. this method wassuggested to me by dr. mary eubanks from ( i believe) duke university in response to an email query i sent to her in the fall of 2009. it worked well for that method so i do nopt see why it would not work for seeds planted directly into the ground. good luck.
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