peculiar behavior for an indoor plant

okay...perhaps more natural than peculiar...but unexpected all the same...the largest of the teosinte plants i started back on october thirteenth ( top photo ) has reached twenty-eight inches in height ( second photo ) a miniscule portion of the eight to ten feet an outdoor plant would reach in one hundred and thirty eight days...however, like a plant outdoors, this one has reached the point in its season where it would flower and that is exactly what it is doing...that structure in the third and fourth photos looks nothing like the new growth leaf in the fifth...i an in virgin territory here since i have never gotten a teosinte plant to get this far along indoors before...so...the next issue is photo period...outdoor teosinte does not begin to form ears until the days shorten in the autumn ( which is why it is always a race between ears and frost here ) so i need to engineer a way to shorten its exposure to light, mimicking autumn...this will be interesting...succeed or fail.