16 Fall 2014 Applegater
The Tuxana corn story
by jonathan sPero
Voices of the Applegate
begins a new session
Voices of the Applegate will begin
another session of four-part harmony
music directed by Blake Weller on
Wednesday, September 3, in the Ruch
Library at 6:30 pm. Rehearsals will be
held from 7 to 8:30 pm every Wednesday
evening at the Ruch Library from
September 3 until November 19.
Two concerts will be presented this
season: the first one on November 21 at
7:30 pm in the Old Presbyterian Church
on California Street in Jacksonville, and
the second one on November 23 at 2 pm
at the Applegate River Lodge.
Tuition this year is $55, which covers
all of our costs, including our music.
Come to the first rehearsal and fill
out your registration form. Everyone is
welcome, even if you have never sung in
a choir before. If you can sing in tune,
you’re in!
For more information, call Joan Peterson at 541-846-6988.
You may have read “The
Top Hat corn story” a couple
of issues back. It described how
I selected Top Hat corn from a
single hybrid parent (Tuxedo)
and selected for sweetness by
picking the last kernels to
commence to wrinkle. Top
Hat corn is growing at Oshala
Farm in the Applegate Valley
this summer and seed should
be available next year for sale.
To create corn with
new or different attributes, I needed to
introduce something more variable, with
some genes that more modern corn lacks.
In 2003, I again grew Tuxedo. This time
I planted 16 rows, every other row across
a field. In each of the 15 alternate rows,
I planted a different multicolored corn.
Most were old or ancient varieties, and
all had red or blue as well as yellow or
white kernels. I de-tasseled all of this
multicolored corn so that all of the corn
was pollinated by the Tuxedo.
The next year I grew a row of each
of these 15 crossed lines. With Tuxedo
providing the pollen, an Anasazi corn
tended to produce vigorous plants with
large ears and large kernels. This Anasazi x
Tuxedo cross led to the white corn Tuxana
as well as to the Ana Lee (yellow) and
Festivity (multicolor) varieties you will see
in future years.
With the more variable Anasazi
corn as the seed parent, picking out the
last-to-dry kernels did not lead to gains in
sweetness as it had in the Top Hat corn. I
suspect that variation in some other trait
in the Anasazi corn has a larger impact on
kernel wrinkling than does sugar content.
I got big, robust kernels, but not sweet
ones. Time for a new plan. I switched from
kernel selection to ear-to-row selection.
Ear-to-row selection (also called
mother-daughter or half-sibling evaluation)
is a classic method for improving open-
pollinated crops. It improves on mass
selection (saving the best plants) in that it
allows evaluation of a plant by the qualities
of that plant’s progeny, and it allows the
elimination of pollen from inferior plants.
In 2012 I grew about 2,000 plants
of Tuxana f5 (5th generation) selected
for white kernels. We taste-tested the
secondary ears on the two-eared plants and
flagged about 500 as sweeter than average.
The primary ear from the chosen plants was
left to mature on the stalk. When the corn
was dry, I chose the 300 nicest looking of
the 500 ears and shelled these individually
into paper bags.
What I wanted to find out is
which of these 300 ears makes the best-
looking and best-tasting corn. So I planted
a sample of the seed from each ear and kept
track of which parent ear it came from. I
saved back the rest of the seed from each
ear, now with a number on the bag, so that
I can plant seeds from only the best ones
next year for the improved crop.
I made a grid of 300, 10-foot rows
and planted 20 seeds from one parent
ear in each row. I rated the rows for
germination and seedling vigor at about
21 days. Later, when the corn was ripe, a
crew of three came through and rated each
row for general stand quality, productivity,
appearance of shucked ear, sweetness and
flavor. We looked at, tasted and rated
ears from each mini-row and made rating
decisions as a group of three. We used a
tablet computer to field-enter data into a
spreadsheet and chose the 100 best overall.
I then separated the 100 numbered
bags of seed from the rows we liked best.
Seed from only those 100 chosen parents
was combined and is being grown in 2014.
Once again, we will be comparing about
2,000 plants with the goal of picking the
300 best to repeat the ear-to-row selection
process in 2015. Ear-to-row selection in
Ana Lee corn is ongoing in 2014 here at
Lupine Knoll Farm, 1225 Messinger Road,
Grants Pass.
Jonathan Spero
spero.jonathan@gmail.com