zea mexicana

the northern tepehuan teosinte in my yard has flowered extravagantly ( three on this one plant ) however the stems show no indication of even beginning the process of forming ears...

the zea mexicana i have grown from the seed i got form the usda is much farther along in it season...

while some ears on some plants are still green ( and these are wrapped in pole bean vines )...

others are looking decidedly done...in fact a few have begun to shatter which is what led to...

me bringing in a couple of clusters of ears that looked finished...this was error...

while there were definitely mature seeds in those clusters, there were easily as many that were not...

so i changed my approach and began checking individual ears still on the plant ( after i ejected the inevitable earwig from each cluster of ears )...i took in all the mature seed i found...

which amounted to forty-four seeds...hopefully that number will expand into the hundreds as it did last season...i have had what i believe to be good luck with viability in second generation seed...the northern tepehuan in the yard is a second generation grown from last year's seed harvest..perhaps there will be no need to inopportune the government again.