Corn Pollination

This is the time of year to really buckle-down into seed saving, which is a simple prospect for many of our garden plants. Lettuce, for example, you simply let go to form a stalk and a bunch of little flowers, which then form seeds with fuzz on them like dandelions. With tomatoes you take the mature fruit, gut it into a jar, and let it sit a few days to ferment the protective layer that coats each seed. Both of these vegetables have something glorious going for them from the gardener's perspective: they are self-pollinating. Each flower has both necessary parts, fertilizes itself, and keeps unwanted crossing to a minimum.
Not so, of course, with corn. I won't go into any depth on the biology of corn pollination, since I wrote about that in an earlier post. But I would love to share how I deal with the question that follows that understanding: How does a person get pure seed under those conditions? Especially if they live in Corn Country? Especially when, if their seed gets contaminated by genetically modified crops Monsanto comes and sues them like they've been doing to lots of small farmers.
My solution comes from Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth. It is one of the great, comprehensive seed saving books for anyone who wants to understand the ins and outs of the subject.
Because it is a time, energy, and focus-intensive process at first, I started last year saving from three Hopi Blue flour corn plants. This year we planted out the resulting successfully-saved seed, together with some of the same variety bought from a catalog. The reason for this is that, in the case of most plants, genetic diversity is important. Seed to Seed recommends, as an absolute minimum, that 100 corn plants should be saved from. You will end up with 50 ears, though, because half of those plants will be participating only by tassel.
Maybe I should explain the method now...
There are two vital elements in corn pollination: the tassel (which releases pollen), and silks (which accept pollen). One silk only accepts one pollen granule, which will become one kernel on an ear. So essentially we need to stand between the silks and ANY tassels.
The best way to do this is by bagging ears before the silks emerge. Choose the best ears right before the silks come out (the only tricky part) and clip the tip of the husk off to see the bundle of silks. They grow fast, like an inch a day, so by clipping them like this they will all be the same size in one or two days when you remove the bag to pollinate them.
The next step comes one or two days later: the collection and distribution of pollen. Get more bags, stick them over tassels and staple them close to the plant, so no pollen drops out. Do this early in the morning before they start shedding pollen. Before it gets hot that day (hot enough to destroy the pollen in the closed bag), say maybe 11am, you take the bag off, bending and shaking the tassel as you do, and then you have a little pollen. Collecting and mixing all the pollen in one bag, you have quite a bit of it.
At that point you make the rounds of your bagged ears. Take off the bag, pour some pollen on the now-emerged silks, and then put the bag back on to mark the ears you selected.
It is a simple as that. As mentioned above, the only tricky part is trying to identify which ears have almost emergent silks. I cut the tips off of many husks only to be disappointed. But, as with many other things, if you don't start and fail a lot, you'll never know what you are doing!
So to sum up the ideal situation: 1) snip tips and bag 50 ears, 2) one or two days later bag 50 tassels from plants whose ears you did not bag, 3) collect the pollen later that morning and pollinate the 50 aforementioned ears. Done! Sit back and watch them grow, and harvest them when they are mature and dry.
Corn and squash are really two of the most difficult plants to keep pure seed from, so if you are feeling adventurous some year, do your reading and jump into it! Once you have it down, you can probably make at least a little money selling the results to a seed company.

Get Them Before They Get You!

I've hit a landmark of west-coast living that I put on the same level as learning how to surf. Last week I ate my first rattlesnake! It happened like this:

Garden Manager Ellen's son Cody, who roams the ranch fixing fences, irrigation pipes, and cows, occasionally runs across a rattlesnake. Often he kills it, and on one notable occasion he skinned one for a hat-band (turning down my suggestion of making gloves - you know, with little rattles at the fingertips?). The natural progression was to grill one up for dinner, which happened last week.
The photo shows clearly what happened: Cody relished it and Ellen, on the right, was disturbed, disgusted, and naseaus. Everyone at the table, in fact, fit into one of those two categories. Happily (for those of us in the former) Cody was willing to share!
Inevitably someone must ask "Does it taste like chicken?" To which I must answer "Probably it tastes like gutted chicken neck grilled with seafood spices." Specifically, a chicken whose neck was genetically modified to contain lots of very strong salmon bones. Tough, but novel.
I am told it is a lot better in stew, though somehow I had always pictured them cut in sushi-style rolls and frittered. Shows what I know. (That's me in the photo on left, sampling my piece).
Ok, now to a subject I have wanted to broach for a while. Hear me out before you mock. There are many among us who say "I am a vegetarian, though I eat fish" or even "I am a vegetarian" when it turns out that white meat in general doesn't count as meat to them. And saying "I am mostly vegetarian" is not objectionable. But I am betting that I could not get away with saying "I am mostly vegan." Never mind that I hardly ever eat meat, or that I consume merely a little butter or honey regularly. I'll let Nikki respond however she likes to that one.
I don't specifically want or need to be vegan (especially given the opportunistic tendencies demonstrated above), it is simply a hypothesis of mine that vegetarians are a little more inclusive with their designation. 'Cause I can still be a mostly vegetarian and eat a little rattlesnake if it crosses my path. Free-range, grass-fed, and everything.
Having enjoyed the novelty of rattlesnake, what other dangerous delights might be next? Here's a hint from our front door (picture it deep-fried, if it helps):

With the Grain

When this book was first published in 1977 I suspected, but could not know for sure, that a day would come when increasing populations and increasing costs of producing and transporting food with fossil fuel, fossil fertilizers, and genetic manipulation would cause food prices to rise so high that more traditional production methods- organic, natural, low-labor and local - would begin to rule the economy. Thirty years later, that is exactly what is happening.

Gene Logsdon, Small Scale Grain Raising

Around about the time we were finishing up our grain harvest, midway through July, we had a visit from a fellow Grow Biointensive practitioner down in San Luis Obispo. John DeRosier has a firm grasp of the benefits of the method, having attended Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop a number of times, and put to use what he has learned. His current passion, though, leads him in a slightly different direction.

Like certain others (myself included) John has been parasitized by the grain bug; the compulsion to cultivate all manner of the edible seeds courses through his system. The difference is that I want to eat my grains and share my enthusiasm while he wants to share the actual grains. I can meet my need by growing my own grain and telling people about it, which is easy enough. But John's calling involves a much larger proposition: growing as much grain as he can.





John's 40 beds of veggies surrounded by a field of grain

Of course, it gets more complicated. Being a proponent of the Grow Biointensive method, he is interested in sustainability. This means turning his back on the world of giant machines and petrochemicals, and working instead on a scale based on human limitations and regeneration of soil. The good news is that operating expenses are minimal: hand tools, a few irrigation supplies, water, and seeds saved from the year before. That is as opposed to tractors, implements, combines, and bills for seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. Find the right market, as in the Community Supported Agriculture format, and you can make a lot of money on a little acreage.
The challenge is that, while everyone was growing grains by hand or by horse 100 years ago, virtually no one in this country is doing it now. So John, through his creativity and drive, is discovering through trial and error the best way to make small-scale grain raising work, physically and economically, in his climate.
To go into the details that John presented to us would be excessive in this post, but the summary is the same as for all farming enterprises: bring creativity, a solution-based mindset, and a love of your land. Add to those a desire to benefit your community, a head full of ideas, and willingness to put the work in and you have a recipe for success on multiple levels. From calculations based on his own experience of time spent per task and yields harvested, he can easily make enough money to support his family and have extra to invest in community grain-processing resources. Because of the smaller scale he can grow an incredible number of varieties of grains, thereby encouraging an appreciation of diversity of grains.
So, to make a long story short, John DeRosier's ideas are an inspiration, and I look forward to seeing the example he is setting for the rest of us aspiring grain-producers. Through his website, WithTheGrain.org, he hopes to post the ongoing process of learning, teaching, failures and successes of his enterprise. (John stands with his millet on the right.)


The quote that begins this post is from the introduction to the second edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon. I can't stress enough the usefulness of this resource, and we were delighted to find the second edition newly released this year by Chelsea Green Publishing.