Monday, June 2, 2014

pod corn

a friend living a few states away sent me some pod corn and it arrived safe and sound today...the thinking at one time was that the line of descent for zea mays ran from teosinte through pod corn to modern maize...geneticists at the max planck institute seem to have put paid to this hypothesis by showing pod corn to be a mutation of zea mays...not the other way around...i have never bumped into this before so it will only ad to my knowledge base about the zea family...peculiar stuff, each kernel is individually husked ( and this would seem to be more in line with some hugh iltus catastrophic sexual mutation hypothesis rather than the clearly artificially selected husks on maize ) and one can only wonder how it would reproduce on its own...but clearly somewhere along the way it has...i will be helping it along however...i pulled some of the husked seeds off the cob ( oddly enough, so far i have found seed only in those husks with some hint of purple coloration on them...the all beige ones are seemingly empty ) and dug out ten seeds altogether an put them in to soak...if i can find a quiet corner in the community garden i will be planting a few there and i will be planting some in my yard in defiance of the squirrels ( i am , at this time, unsure if they will eat it...probably...they are voracious...but gardeners are hopeful people despite what people say about me, and i will try anyway )...like everything else in the gardens there will be more posts as things develop...this one's for fun.

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