Corn Planting

Today we planted our field corn. The variety we grow is called Wapesie Valley and is an old open pollenated heirloom dent corn from the 1800's. We have been growing it for 4 years and I have been selecting it to ripen good in our area. It need 1000 growing days to mature well so this gets close to our fall rainy wether. Last year was very wet it rained almost every week! this was good for the corn while it was growing but not during the harvest. Many of the farmers had trouble with there GMO (it should not be called corn) molding or not even ripening. But ours did good and did not mold. Another three cheers for OP corn! and heaps upon heaps of curses on all the GMOs. May a disease attack it's mixed up genes that it fall to the ground wither and die and be remembered no more. One thing I look for when saving the corn seed is the first and biggest ears to tern down in the early fall but since this is a very genetically diverse corn I don't limit it to just this traits, and so when we're husking it I keep out any uniquely colored ears or kernels to keep it this way. Last year I found several ears with sweet corn characteristics (sweet, wrinkled, and clearish ) I know it did not cross with the sweet corn because the ears were found in the middle of the corn field and there was not any sweet corn near by. I'm going to grow it out and see what becomes of it. One thing unique about this corn variety is it colors, its ears ranges from mostly yellow, to orange, red, and dark maroon. So the sweet corn will be these colors too. It will be interesting to see if it works out and maybe I'll be the first to have developed an open pollenated sweet corn with these colors!