I was glad to see that you didn't lose all the plants for most of the varieties. I guess you can at least fold it back in via the freezer, even if this year doesn't let you grow out a full gene pool. Hard lessons, though.

Tall corn seems like trouble to me -- it gets knocked over by wind so easily! But I guess maybe it also might produce more per unit area, just by having that added plant volume? Maybe not. I have the vague impression that industrial corn operations prefer dwarfish (but apically dominant) plants.

I didn't know about tillering until one of your recent posts. I asked my dad about it, since I couldn't quite remember if I'd seen it happen in our gardens. He said that at one point he grew a very short blue corn (he gestured about waist high) that tillered quite heavily. Could be a good option for certain kinds of row cover, high wind, maybe other situations.