Greenstorm's Journal

I was invited to infodump about my favourite topic today. I responded with this:

I like plants, especially edibles, and especially temperate and cold/temperate edibles, especially growing in ways that genetics and combination on the landscape contribute to carefully-chosen system goals, especially heterogenous varieties eg modern landracing (or old landraces, I'll take 'em all!), especially if those goals are non-conventional (eg not 'how much land can we farm with the fewest people but the most gas and tractors' but more to optimize for human power or climate or the particular site's water or soil or aspect or or), especially if animals are involved in that small human-designed ecosystem, especially if it's allowed to evolve through propagation and selection over time, especially if the surplus that humans take from that system is optimized for local community use including aesthetic preferences and values as well as flavour, comfort, etc, especially if those surplus foods (but also fibre etc) is aligned with cultural use and preservation practices, plus I enjoy learning those use and preservation practices including charcuterie, brewing, canning, drying, annd fermenting. But sometimes I go on a kick and grow a monstera or my grandma's spider plant or fifty kinds of hot pepper just for fun and I keep a bunch of geese and cats and dogs and an old hen around as pets even if they're not contributing to my system. Oh, and I love love love plant variety trials; I live where the only domestic plants that grow reliably are from the old Siberian breeding programs so I need to trial and breed my own varieties (it's super cool here over the summer so nothing ripens, and it's -40C in winter so any perennials die).

Last year I trialled 24 varieties of corn including my heart-corn (gaspe) and discovered some new ones that do well here and I'm going to landrace them, and I made a a surprisingly successful squash grex, and I'm growing a bunch of tomatoes that a collaborator outcrossed to wild relatives to try and get the flowers to cross-pollinate more and thus allow more natural geneflow within the population so I don't have to make a million hand-crosses (tomatoes don't naturally cross much). I was asked in the group this evening about what kind of plant breeding I was into and kind of saved this up for a more appropriate spot. 🙂

Gaspe corn is knee-high and comes from the gaspe penninsula in Quebec, it's one of the shortest season corns in the world; it's a grain corn and grows about knee-high and fills me with absolute awe and gratitude that so many hands cherished corn from the time it was a grass in south-central mexico, and with love and attention they slowly selected and planted and selected and planted until it was corn, and then selected and planted and selected and planted and it spread into myriad forms across north america, slowly, going at the rate of friendship and sharing and at the rate the plant could adapt over so much time, through forms 20' tall with aerial roots, and then eventually spreading up to Quebec where it was so cold and short-season that it was basically unrecogniseable from not just the original plant but from the intermediate forms. All those people, all that persistence, that cooperatively created this plant that now can come live with me where no modern corn can grow. I love it so much. Also if you want to try growing some grain corn and are serious about it, I have seeds to share. (imagine a sea of green heart emojis)

So it looks like I'm keeping my garden up north for this full season. What does that mean? It means I can be more hands-on here with some corn.

A brilliant plant breeder on one of my forums does something he calls a "pollen patch": instead of trying to plant the corns all together and hope they cross properly, he plants a bunch of the pollinator corn pretty close, not so that it'll grow ears but just so it'll produce a bunch of pollen. He de-tassels (removes the pollen-producing body part) from the mother corns in the well-spaced patch, and dusts them with pollen from the pollen patch when it's ripe. In this way he can thoroughly mix up the pollen and distribute it without both control and a lot of saved space.

Brilliant, because it divorces the concept of pollination from proximity.

I plan on using this schema to northernize/gaspe-ize a bunch of corns this year.

Gaspe is challenging to breed with because it is so short season, so it doesn't flower at the same time as the other corns. I was trying to think of ways to plant it later into an established corn patch, which seemed weird. Because of this idea of seperation, what I can do is plant all the corns I want to cross (no need to space them tightly and prevent them from self-pollinating in my case, there's plenty of pollen to go around) and then start planting gaspe in patches, one every week or so. As the pollen donor corns come into flower I can transfer each type over to the gaspe, label that patch with the pollen donor, label the next patch with the next pollen donor, and so on. It saves me from having to know how fast everything will grow and when flowering time is, too.

I'm just so awed and impressed by this concept.

Anyhow, this year I want to pollinate gaspe with a bunch of other interesting, short season corns, including: some atomic orange from an oceanside farm in California, Cascade Ruby-Gold if I can get it to grow, painted mountain, mountain morado, maybe double red and blue jade (which are sweets), saskatoon white, oaxacan green dent, floriani, maybe early riser, new york dent, and saskatchewan rainbow but realistically although this is a super space-efficient method eight or ten is enough.

It's also important to me to see how my magic manna saved corn from last year does, I'll need to isolate it a fair bit and also isolate or bag some Morden, and then have a seperate patch of gaspe. Hm. Gotta play with the layout some, I may need to take down some trees after all.

But! If I do all these crosses it's a huge step towards very, very short season diversity up here.

Some squash and beans in those fields, and some lettuce and brassicas left to go to seed, and I'm happy. But more on those later. This is just me sitting here loving corn, and loving gaspe so much I want to make fascinating things with it that everyone will want to grow so its genes can go on forever and ever, not as a novelty but as a real part of food systems.

And honestly a very short-cropping corn isn't only useful up here; it's also useful in the lull between flood and wildfire, or drought and frost, or before tornado season, or whatever else is going on out there.

Meanwhile I have a tray of promiscuous tomatoes, a tray of tomatoes that did well last year, and several trays (bigger pots, fewer plants) of favourite breeding tomatoes.

Turns out even with uncertainty it's still a good spring.

And I can grow a bunch of of corn out down south still, which will provide food and seed for the following year but won't need much supervision: painted mountain, and early riser/homestead yellow dent/new york red/cascade ruby gold.

Back chicken coop (covered run):
Chanteclers
Muscovies
Pilgrims

Greenhouse:
Anconas
Embdens

A-frame:
Romans

Lean-to for saddleback pair? I'd need to dig out the gate. Or I could put them in a pig a-frame.