I grew some glass gem corn with the kids. I planted the seeds in blocks of similar colours. Some of the pinks grew almost exclusively pink cobs.
Glass gem corn carries a lot of recessive genes, so much like the cobs below these will still throw the odd seed of a different colour. They still look very pretty and are loved by my daughters.
I saved the seeds from the pink cobs separately from the mixed coloured cobs. If planted in a block
it should produce cobs that are almost entirely pink, with just a few kernels of other colours. I removed most of
the different colour seeds, but left in some of the purple and some of
the blue that my kids thought looked more purple. I also left in some of the whites as they seemed to be light pink rather than true white.
All of these carry at least one gene for pink colour. Unless they are planted too close to other corn and are cross pollinated, they should produce cobs as pink as the ones above.
If you want to grow pink popcorn I sell the pink gem corn seeds through my for sale page.
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| Pink Gem Popcorn |
What do you use this corn for? Is it popcorn? I assume it's not normal eating corn
ReplyDeleteHi Melinda,
ReplyDeleteyes, it is a popcorn. You can grind it into flour, but I haven't bothered doing that yet. Unfortunately, like the normal yellow popcorn this still pops white.
I do have a pink/purple and white sweet corn called "Immali corn". It is very pretty and I believe it is the first purple sweet corn developed in Australia. I used the su and se+ genes for sweetness, meaning it is not great for long storage or shipping across the country, but tastes far better. It is great for home gardeners.
The University of Queensland lead by Tim O'Hare have since started to develop purple sweet corn, I don't know if it is stable yet. I understand that they are using the sh-2 gene for sweetness, which generally leads to sweet corn with a long shelf life and great for transporting across the country, but generally an insipid taste.