8 Steps to Saving Corn Seed

March 29, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

In a previous post, we gave you 22 reasons to save seed in 2022. We hope that all of our customers are considering saving some seed this year. If you’re new to seed saving, one crop that’s great for beginners is corn. Whether you’re growing sweet corn, flour corn, Gourdseed corn, or popcorn, saving corn seed is simple! It’s an easy-to-grow annual, and its large seeds are easy to process and store.

Selecting a Variety

When selecting a corn variety, whether you’re growing sweet corn, popcorn, or flour corn, you need to choose an open-pollinated variety. These are seeds that were pollinated by other plants of the same variety. This means that as long as you keep them isolated from other varieties, they will keep producing true to this variety year after year. All heirlooms are open-pollinated.

Hybrids are seeds that are the result of a cross between two varieties. Typically seed saved from hybrids will not produce plants that are the same as the parent plant.

Sweet Corn hybrids are the only hybrid varieties we carry at SESE. We have a couple of hybrid sweet corns because some of the farmers and market gardeners who purchase our seed prefer the uniformity and reliability of these hybrids. However, they’re not suitable for seed saving.

Plan Your Garden for Saving Corn Seed

Unlike most garden vegetables that rely on insect pollination, corn is a wind-pollinated crop. Pollen is carried from the tassels of corn stalks to the silks on other stalks by the wind. Each silk connects to a potential kernel (a plant ovule). If you’ve ever had corn that didn’t produce many kernels, it’s because they weren’t fertilized.

When you plan your garden’s layout, you want to ensure that the corn you intend to save seed from is separated from other varieties by 600 feet for home use or one mile for pure seed.

Select Your Best Plants

When you save seed year after year, you have the ability to improve a variety. You can select for a variety of plant characteristics. You can select for traits like flavor, earliness, disease resistance, and drought tolerance if you save seed from the plants that perform the best.

Let Your Corn Fully Mature

When harvesting corn for seed, it’s essential to let the corn fully mature and dry on the plant. The husk and stalks should be papery and brown. The silks should be dry and brown. When you harvest, the kernels should feel hard and dry. You shouldn’t be able to puncture them with a thumbnail. Sweet corn kernels should have a wrinkled appearance.

Harvest Your Seeds

You want to ensure you’re saving enough to maintain genetic diversity when you harvest seed. Save at least 500 seeds from at least 10% of the plants to maintain the vigor and genetic diversity of the variety.

Dry Your Ears

Most corn should be dried further after harvesting to ensure mold doesn’t develop in storage. You’ll want to dry your corn somewhere out of direct sunlight.

You can do this in a few ways. One option is to pull back the husks but not remove them. They can be hung from the husks separately or braided into bunches. You can also remove the husks entirely and hang the cobs in mesh bags. It’s a good idea to shake the bags around every couple of days to ensure all the cobs are drying evenly. Lastly, you can lay the cobs out on a rack or screen. Large screens can be made using lumber and chicken wire or hardware cloth.

Process Your Seeds

Corn seed is easy to process. To remove the kernels, you can use your hand and twist it over the kernels. You can also use a corn sheller to make this process easier on your hands.

Though it isn’t strictly necessary if your corn is just for seed use, you can winnow out any chafe (plant material). To do this, place a box fan on a chair or stool with a bucket in front of it. Then, with the fan on, dump your corn seed into the bucket. The fan should blow away the lighter plant material while the kernels fall into the bucket. You may have to do this several times to remove all the chafe.

Store Your Seeds

Once your seeds are fully dry and clean, you can store them in airtight containers. Mason jars work well for this. Keep them somewhere cool and dark until you’re ready to plant them next season!

Learn how to do a germination test in this post, Seeds: Tips for Storing, Testing, & Saving.

Using these eight simple steps, you can save seed from your corn crop! To learn more about saving seeds from other crops, check out these posts: Easy Seed Saving with Promiscuous Pollination, 7 Steps to Saving Cucumber Seed, 6 Steps to Saving Pumpkin Seeds, Seed Saving from Biennial Crops, and Seed Saving for Beginners.

Garden Advice

10 Mini Vegetables You’ll Adore

March 22, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Bigger isn’t always better! These ten mini vegetables provide incredible beauty and flavor in little packages. They’re great for folks looking to add something unique to their garden or work within a small space.

1. Chires Baby Sweet Corn

Do you know the little ears of corn popular in Asian stir-fries? That’s what Chires is great for. Harvest your Chires soon after the silks emerge, and they make a tasty, crunchy addition to salads, stir-fries, and kabobs. If allowed to mature and dry on the plant, they can be used for popcorn. These little guys can also be blanched and frozen or pressure canned for winter use.

This variety produces 3-5 foot stalks, with 8-12 ears per stalk. The ears are 2-3 inches long. Chires are easy to grow, as corn earworms don’t have time to do damage, and corn smut is rarely a problem.

2. Doe Hill Golden Bell Sweet Peppers

If you’ve struggled to grow large bell peppers, you might want to try these Doe Hill Golden Bells. They’re high-yielding, widely adapted, and disease resistant. We love the miniature (1 x 2¼ in.) flattened, orange bell peppers they produce. The peppers have sweet, fruity, multidimensional flavor and keep well.

This pre-1900 family heirloom came to us from the Doe Hill area in Highland County, Virginia. It was introduced by SESE in 2000.

3. Plum Granny (Queen Anne Pocket) Melon

Interestingly, these melons aren’t typically grown for eating. While they are edible, their flavor is rather bland. Instead, these tennis ball-sized melons are usually grown for their incredible melon fragrance. They’re also quite beautiful. Their skin is yellow with maroon stripes.

Plum Granny Melons are an Appalachian heirloom that was brought to Appalachia with European settlers. In Victorian times, these melons were sometimes carried in pockets to mask unpleasant odors.

4. Mexican Sour Gherkin (Mouse Melon, Sandita)

These tenacious vines bear many 5⁄8 in. x 7⁄8 in. fruits with skin like tiny watermelons. They’re a sure conversation piece for your garden, and they taste good too! Immature, they taste like cucumbers; when fully mature, they taste like pickled cucumbers.

We recommend you trellis Mexican Sour Gherkins. Kids and adults will love snacking on these if planted along a garden path. They’ll bear until frost.

5. Tom Thumb Bibb (Butterhead) Lettuce

This space-saving miniature butterhead dates to before 1850! It’s perfect for those with tiny gardens or individuals who only need a little bit of lettuce at one time. Just make sure to sow several successions!

Tom Thumb heads are about the size of an apple and feature tender, crumpled, medium-green leaves. Popular in some restaurants, the heads can be used whole in individual salads.

6. Everglades Cherry Tomato

Many people don’t have the time or space to grow large rows of tomatoes, but most people could find space on a patio or balcony for a potted plant. A single, potted Everglades Cherry will provide you with a surprising amount of fresh tomatoes throughout the season! These vigorous, disease-resistant plants will bear right up until frost.

Everglades Cherries produce sweet, dark pink, ½ in. fruits. They’re similar to Matt’s Wild Cherry, but pinker, with some differences in flavor. A relatively new variety to SESE, the seedstock for Everglades was provided by Melissa DeSa of Florida.

Check out our other post, Grow Anywhere: Tips for Container Gardening.

7. Roseland Small White Pickling Cucumbers

SESE introduced this North Carolina heirloom in 2016. In the early ’70s, Gordon Shronce’s sister Evelyn Allran received seed from a neighbor in the Roseland community near Lincolnton, NC.

Roseland Small produces loads of early, blocky white cucumbers. Gordon likes to pick them at 3 in. or less, but they’re still mild and tender to 7 in. long, great sliced or pickled.

8. Morden Midget (Morden Mini) Eggplant

The Morden Mini is an excellent short-season variety for those farther north! It was developed in 1958 by Morden Experimental Farm, Manitoba, Canada. In our rare cool summers here in Virginia, it produces better harvests in June and July than our other varieties.

The short 18 to 30-inch plants also perform well in containers for those with limited space. Morden Mini produces 3 to 4-inch dark purple fruits.

9. Aji Ayuyo Peppers

This Peruvian heirloom is both beautiful and tasty. It would excel in edible landscape producing multicolor 1 inch by 1-inch peppers with a beautiful, shiny, glassy look. The plants grow to about 3 feet in height.

The Aji Ayuyo Peppers ripen from purple to cream to orange to red. They have a sweet, juicy exterior and very hot seeds.

10. Black Cherry Tomato

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes are always a favorite. They’re delicious and beautiful, but they require a lot of space and effort. These little Black Cherries have a similar flavor and appearance in a smaller package.

The plants are vigorous and produce dusky purple 1-inch fruits with black highlights and full-bodied flavor. They’re an indeterminate variety and are generally ready to harvest in just 63 days.

Whether you just love adorable vegetables or are trying to save space, giving a few of these ten tiny varieties might be great for your garden. Fall in love with the incredible fragrance of Plum Granny Melons, the gem-like appearance of Aji Ayuyo Peppers, or the complex flavor of Black Cherry tomatoes this season!

Garden Advice

22 Reasons to Save Seed in 2022

March 15, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

In just a tiny handful, seeds contain hope for the future, culture, memories of the past, and beauty and produce to fill the garden and home for the coming season. Saving some of your own seed is a great project to tackle this year. Here are 22 reasons you should save seed in 2022.

1. Help Preserve Biological Diversity

Modern agriculture has caused a rapid decrease in the number of varieties available. In the past, most home gardeners and small farms saved seed from a least a few varieties. Over time, these varieties were adapted and bred to local conditions and tastes. Big agriculture has changed all of that. Large farms stick to a few standard varieties that provide uniform production and pack and ship well. When we save seed we save precious varieties whose genetics may be essential in the future.

2. Increase Your Self-Reliance

You don’t have to move off the grid, cut yourself off from the community, or grow all your own food to become a little more self-reliant. Small acts like saving seed can help you become a creator rather than just a consumer.

3. Have Some to Share or Trade

Seeds from your favorite varieties make awesome gifts for gardening family and friends! It’s also great to have some to swap whether you’re bartering with your neighbors or find a local or online seed exchange.

4. Teach Your Kids

Saving seeds can be an excellent biology lesson for kids. You can use the opportunity to teach them about plant life cycles, your local climate, and pollinators. It’s also a great life skill for them to have in adulthood.

5. Save Money

For most families, seeds probably aren’t one of your biggest expenses, but the cost of good quality seeds does add up! Saving some seed each year can help you cut down on your seed order bill each winter and maximize the return on your garden.

6. Adapt Seeds to Your Location

When we save seed, we select plants that performed well in our gardens. Each year that seed is saved from a particular place helps the variety become more and more adapted to local conditions.

7. Connect With Your Heritage

The industrial revolution, big agriculture, and quick, convenience foods have led to all of us stepping away from our family’s food and farming culture. Saving seed can help you take some of the back, no matter what your heritage may be.

With a bit of digging, you may find some of your family’s garden heritage. Maybe your family grew dent corn like Hickory Kind Dent Corn in the hills and hollers of Virginia. You might learn that your grandparents grew okra like Cajun Jewel in Louisiana or that your aunt was famous for her tomato sauce created with heirloom varieties like San Marzano or Black Plum. At a wider glance, you can find heirlooms from food cultures across the globe like Danish beets, Mexican tomatillos, or Eritrean basil.

8. Breed Your Own Varieties

Saving seed isn’t just about preserving heirlooms! You can also begin breeding your own varieties. Want large tomatoes that have the flavor of Matt’s Wild Cherries or collards that are blueish and tolerate drought? See if you can breed your own.

9. Spend More Time in Nature

For many home gardeners, once food is harvested the garden season is done. That’s not the case for seed savers. Starting a seed-saving practice will help you spend more time connecting to nature and working with plants in all of their life cycles.

10. Experience Living History

We may not want to live as our ancestors did, but growing food and stewarding seeds is a great way to live history. You’ll experience firsthand a process that humans have been doing for at least 12,000 years.

11. Join a Community

It can often be hard to find a sense of community in today’s troubled, busy world. By saving seed, you join the ranks of seed stewards (mostly home gardeners) worldwide, working towards a common goal. You can find groups both online and locally to share seeds and information.

12. Take a Stand Against Big Corporations

At Southern Exposure, we believe that everyone has the right to save seed. We know that seed saving plays a vital role in food justice, agricultural biodiversity, and culture. By practicing seed saving and sharing, you support seed sovereignty and stand against big corporations.

13. Create a Family Tradition

Many of the heirlooms we carry were given to us by a family that stewarded them through the generations. These varieties are laced with the family’s history, stories, and memories. Saving seed, even from just one variety, is a great tradition to build with your family.

14. Get in Touch With The Seasons

In the past, humans’ lives flowed with the seasons. While gardeners may experience this more than non-gardeners, saving seed takes this process a step further. Sowing a tomato seed in February or March, caring for the tender seedling, transplanting it out, weeding, watering, and trellising until the tomatoes are ripe and then harvesting fermenting, cleaning, drying, and properly storing the new seeds until you can plant them again takes you through the entire year.

15. Support Pollinators

Many crops like carrots, lettuce, and radishes are typically harvested before they get a chance to flower and go to seed. These flowers are wonderful food sources for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Allowing these and other crops to go to seed in your garden helps support pollinators and encourages them to spend time in your garden.

16. Provide Seeds to Communities in Need

Not everyone has access to heirloom, good quality seed. If you have extra seed you can always donate it to families or communities in need. By donating to a community garden, seed library, or just someone in your neighborhood, you support food justice for all.

17. It Can Save You Time in the Future

This one may sound like a stretch, but saving seed can save you time on garden chores down the road. As you adapt varieties to your local conditions, you’ll need to spend less time watering. California farmer Kristyn Leach spent six years breeding and adapting an eggplant variety to her farm, and “…at the end of that time, Leach went from needing to water the crop three hours every other day to one and a half hours every week.” She also worked to create varieties that needed less fertilizer.

18. Always Have Access to the Varieties You Want

As we’ve personally seen during the pandemic, demand for seed can change quickly, and growers may be unable to provide for a rapid increase in sales. Saving your own seed ensures you’ll always have pole bean seeds even if other organizations and we sell out.

19. It’s Not as Hard as You Think

Learning to save seed can seem like a monumental task, but we promise it’s not as difficult as it sometimes sounds! Previously, Irena discussed Promiscuous Pollination and how it’s okay to save seed even if you’re unsure whether a crop has cross-pollinated. We also have a variety of resources to get you started with straightforward varieties like our Easy Seed Saving Collection and these additional blog posts:

20. Get Even More Satisfaction From Your Garden

Remember that feeling when you harvested your first basket of beans or picked your first gorgeous bell pepper? Seed saving brings that same feeling of pride and achievement. We promise.

21. Deepen Your Knowledge of Plants and Pollinators

Growing a garden is a great way to learn from nature. Saving seed from that garden takes it even further. Do you know when beets go to seed? How about how far apart tomatoes should be to avoid cross-pollination or what pollinates flowers that open at night? Saving seeds will open a new world in the garden.

22. Share Knowledge

As you learn to save seed, you can take others on the same journey. This vital skill is lost as we lose small farms and home gardens, keep it alive, and share it with others.

Saving seed is more important than ever. Whatever your reason, we encourage all of our customers to save seed from at least one variety this year!