zea

the season is as finished for the teosinte as it is for its descendants in the field behind the big box stores so i cut down a stalk and propped it up by the house to provide another scale for its size..much larger than northern tepehuan teosinte with ears alternating down the main stalk...these are fairly large...about three inches in length and they resemble the ears on dense yellow #2 ( sixth photo )...unlike the single stalk field corn however, the teosinte has branches ( last two photos )...there are four coming off this stalk and each of the branches has ears aligned along it end to end ( like smaller northern tepehuan plants in shadier spots produce ) all told this plant had thirty-one ears and my experience of this variety so far has been that each husk contains two or three spikes of seeds wrapped in their own interior husks...could those separate spikes have mutated into rows around a cob...seems likely.