Glass Bead Corn

When I was younger we used to grow some beautiful multi coloured corn, as a child I loved the stuff, it was inspirational and looked amazing.  As a child I would carefully save seeds each year and only plant the most amazing ones, every year the resulting cobs were far superior to their parents.  

While not the best photo of the Glass Bead corn you can see some of the different coloured and spotted seeds

After doing some research it appears that each colour has a different nutrient profile and pretty much every colour other than white is better for you than the usual yellow colour.  In Australia we pretty much only see yellow corn, in Africa they only see yellow corn when they are starving and foreign aide comes in, other than that they predominantly grow white corn as they see yellow corn as a famine food, native people in the Americas who originally domesticated corn grow a multitude of colours.

After moving here and having a little extra space I wanted to track some coloured corn down again to grow for cornflour as well as animal feed.  Nowhere had it listed for sale.  I emailed all of the seed companies that used to stock it and they all replied saying that they no longer stock it.  I then emailed a few seed saver groups to ask if any of their members had some that they were willing to sell me, the replies ranged from "we do not save seed, we only buy bulk heirloom seed to distribute to members" to "we do not sell seeds, please google heirloom seeds and leave us alone".  Further research showed that many of the corn varieties that I used to grow are now extinct in Australia.  This is rather worrying as corn seed not be imported into Australia easily.

After much searching and asking around I found a lady in Western Australia who had several varieties of multi coloured corn.  She had one variety that she called "glass bead corn" that she had selected from the prettiest seeds from the best cobs of an Indian corn that she had.  She claimed that some of her cobs looked similar to the glass gem corn that you may have seen on the internet.  I ordered two packets of these corn seeds, one to grow and one as insurance in case I lost the crop and had to replant, and eagerly waited for them to arrive.

Not my picture unfortunately, but many of my cobs had coloured silk like this

When the seeds turned up I was a little disappointed, there were 60 seeds in the packet and only 10 of them were anything other than yellow.  Some were nicely coloured, some had a single coloured spot on them, but most were just yellow.  I know that the yellow seeds carry hidden genes for colour, but I had hoped for a few more coloured seeds in the mix.  I carefully planted the seeds out in a way that would maximise the coloured pollen landing on the yellow cobs and hopefully would result in a lot of coloured cobs.  

Glass Bead Corn - huge array of genes at play here

Then the birds came, they scratched through the garden and kicked mulch everywhere.  I was not certain if any of the seeds were left in the soil but I continued to water them, to my surprise most of the glass bead corn seeds had not been eaten and they germinated for me.

I am no photographer, this is the most beautiful cob in real life but looks ordinary in the photo

The corn plants themselves were remarkable, they have a lot of genetic variation which means that this strain is not overly inbred and should adapt to various climates well.  They survived an extreme summer here by growing to a height of between 2 and 3 metres tall.  We had no rain, extreme heat, and high wind, some plants were blown over or even snapped by the wind, but overall they all grew very well.  We had also grown a packet of sweet corn, only one single plant survived to maturity as the conditions were too harsh this year, that highlighted the strength of this amazing strain of glass bead corn.

As the plants grew some of the leaves were variegated, some of the stalks were bright red, some of the pollen bearing tassels were purple or red, some of the silk was red or purple or yellow, even some of the sheaths covering the ears were coloured, on top of that most plants were producing two large ears of corn, I had a good feeling that I could turn this corn into something great.  Next year I will have to try and remember to get some pictures of the plants as they are growing, some of them would not look out of place in an ornamental garden.

Corn was traditionally grown with a multitude of colours - this is more of our Glass Bead Corn

You can see some of the spotted seeds of the glass bead corn

After harvest I had some beautiful cobs as well as some mediocre ones.  When people see these cobs they are amazed by the colours and patterns of the seeds, there are yellow, white, purple, pink, red, orange, black, brown, striped, spotted and even marble swirled coloured seeds on each cob.  It is not quite as good as the ones I grew when I was younger, but I plan to eat all the substandard cobs/seeds and only plant the best, this way it will only take a few years to turn this into something truly amazing.

These are a dark red/coffee colour with a few black seeds in real life - Igloos favourite

I will probably sell a small amount of the Glass Bead corn seeds in Australia each year.  These are non-hybrid, organically grown, open pollinated and non GM seeds.  There will be some yellow seed in each packet as well as a mix of colours, these yellow seeds will all carry recessive genes for a multitude of colours and patterns and besides that cobs look nice with a small amount of yellow mixed through.  I will put details on my "for sale" page so that you can contact me.

Glass bead corn - not too shabby considering the conditions it survived

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Yacon the worlds most civilised vegetable

Yacon (Smallanthus sonchifolius formerly known as Polymnia sonchifolia) is a perennial root vegetable from South America.  

If you have never eaten yacon then you are missing out on something truly special. 

When Tracey asked our five year old to describe yacon he said: "They taste like apple. They look like a tube and grow underground like a potato. The leaves feel like a soft blanket."  To be honest I think that is as good a description as any.

How I first grew yacon

I read about yacon years ago on the Lost crops site and eventually tracked down a small rhizome to buy over the internet.  I spent a bit of money to get yacon and had no idea if it would grow for me or even if I would like it.  You plant yacon in spring, then you wait as it grows happily, if you have frosts it is best to let it die down over winter before harvest.  After planting it I waited patiently as it grew, still never having tasted it, all the while tempted to dig up a small root to try but trying to be patient so the plant could do its thing properly.  The yacon grew about waist high and looked nice, towards the end of the growing season it dropped a few leaves and looked a bit shabby.  The yacon then grows a small yellow sunflower like flower some years, unfortunately they require more than one clone in order to set viable seed and as far as I am aware there is only one yacon clone in Australia.

Yacon flowers

Then winter came, I was very excited, but the frosts did not kill off the tops so I waited until we had a hard frost as frost apparently makes the roots sweeter.  We then had a hard frost, and the yacon looked a little burned but overall was not too bothered, even though it does not look like it yacon is a pretty hardy plant.  After a few hard frosts the tops eventually succumbed to the cold.  I carefully dug up the large and brittle tubers and tried one, I liked it but it was nothing special.  The yield was amazing, from the one tiny rhizome that I initially planted I ended up with a dozen much larger rhizomes and a bucket full of large tubers, but if the taste was not great I did not want to use the space on them regardless of the yield.  Everything I had read said that if you leave yacon for a few weeks after digging it up it gets sweeter, so I waited for a few weeks for the tubers to sweeten, I then tried another one, I loved it!  

I wish that yacon was more readily available in Australia, even if the plants were more available for people to grow at home it would be great, this is why I started to sell plants.  I am rather fond of perennial vegetables, once you plant them you pretty much will have them forever.

Yacon, note the light brown edible tuber and the purple propagative rhizome

How to grow yacon

I have included some growing notes here that describes things a bit more clearly.  Yacon are interesting plants to grow, they pretty much look after themselves, they are hugely productive, and they are perennial.  From what I have read it can grow and be harvested all year in frost free places, apparently without frost you just wait an extra couple of days after harvest to let it sweeten before eating it.

I have never heard of anyone who has grown yacon complain of any pest or disease that affects the plants.  Yacon seems not overly picky about soil conditions, planted in rich moist soil it gives the highest yields, but it still gives a decent yield on poor soil with minimal water.  Yacon prefers full sun but will also provide a decent yield in part shade, it is well suited to growing under trees to utilise an otherwise wasted space.  One thing that yacon does not like is rocks and stones in the soil, the tubers will still grow and give a large and delicious yield but they will be misshapen due the pressure exerted upon them from the stones etc in the soil.

Unlike jerusalem artichokes to which yacon is related, yacon poses no weed threat, it grows well yet it remains civilised by not taking over the vegetable garden, in fact other plants seem to grow better when yacon is grown near them.  Yacon exudes inulin and other sugars from its roots which attracts and feeds earth worms as well as a host of other beneficial soil life.  I am told that yacon is readily colonised by mycorrhizae which promote plant growth in a number of ways.

Purple Yacon rhizomes ready to be divided and planted

Yacon is edible, delicious and healthy
Another civilised thing about yacon is that every part is edible as well as being good for you.  Some other vegetables have some parts you can eat and others you can not, or some things which must be eaten cooked as they are toxic if raw, or irritating hairs or spines that must be dealt with, all parts of yacon can be eaten either raw or cooked.  The large sweet crunchy tubers are the part that we like the best, we do not tend to eat any other parts.  Mostly we eat the tubers raw, some people just dig them up and eat them as is but I peel them as the skin can taste a little like resin.  I find that if I slice them thin they taste the best.

Yacon is crunchy and sweet, after cooking it retains its crunch but tends to take on the flavour of whatever it is cooked with.  It can be used in the place of water chestnuts in recipes.  Even though yacon is very sweet the sugars are not digested by people which makes it fine to be eaten by diabetics.  Yacon is high in inulin (which is different to insulin), inulin is a natural prebiotic which feeds the good bacteria in your body and helps to exclude the bad bacteria.  This means that as well as tasting great yacon is good for you.

Once harvested yacon tubers seem to last anywhere from a few months to a year depending on climate in which they are stored.  One year we had far too many yacon tubers so decided to freeze some of them.  Once frozen they last seemingly forever.  To eat them it is important not to thaw them as they go black and slimy looking.  I remove the tubers from the freezer, peel them with a vegetable peeler, slice them and eat them.  When frozen yacon tubers are easy to peel and easy to slice.  When frozen yacon tastes different to when it is raw, it is difficult to describe but it kind of tastes like frozen banana custard.  My kids seem to like frozen yacon even more than they like raw yacon.

Another remarkably civilised thing about yacon is that the part that you eat is different to the part that you plant to grow a crop for next season.  Unlike other vegetable crops where you have to decide how much to eat and how much to save to replant or you have to decide how many plants to let go to seed, you eat all of the yacon tubers and plant all of the propagative rhizomes.  As yacon is propagated by division and does not produce seed you do not have to worry about caging or separating to keep seed pure or growing enough plants to avoid inbreeding depression.  Growing yacon by divisions means you never have to worry about the neighbours growing GM crops that will cross pollinate and ruin your plants, the yacon that we grow and eat today is genetically the same as the yacon plants that the Incas domesticated and grew.

Small yacon plant almost ready to be harvested after frost

Harvesting Yacon

The different parts of yacon are easy to tell apart as the tubers are large and brown and look like sweet potato, the propogative rhizome is purplish and small and has growing points, you will see these when you harvest yacon.

I look forward to yacon harvest each year, not only because it means that in a few weeks I will be eating sweet yacon, but also because of the unmistakable yacon smell.  It is a smell that cant be described, a smell that says that winter is here, a smell that helps keep me connected to the land and the seasons, a smell I miss over the rest of the year.  When we harvest yacon I carefully dig/pull up a plant and shake it gently.  The edible tubers fall off in a civilized pile and what is left in my hand is for dividing and replanting.

Yacon leaf,  it "feels like a soft blanket"

The leaves are large and fuzzy, as Igloo says they "feel like a soft blanket".  I have heard that in Peru the leaves are used to wrap food before it is cooked, kind of like a banana leaf or a grape leaf, but I am yet to try this myself.  A herbal tea can be made from the leaves which helps to even out blood sugar.  The leaves can be picked and used straight away, or they can be left somewhere out of the sun to dry and then used to make the herbal tea later.  Unlike many herbal claims this claim that yacon leaves lower blood sugar levels seems to have been tested and proven to be true.  I have only made tea from the leaves once and found the taste to be a little odd, kind of like peppermint mixed with something.  I didnt really like it, but I didnt hate it, I am glad to say that the taste was not very strong.  It would probably taste nice if you mixed it with something that tastes better or something that has a strong taste that would overpower the yacon.


Where to buy yacon plants in Australia

As I already mentioned, if you have not eaten yacon you are missing out on something really special.  The chances are that you will never see yacon in the supermarket, so if you plan to try some or if you want your children to try some you must grow your own.  I do sell yacon rhizomes (a bit larger than the ones in the pictures above) here.


Ecclesiastes 3:1-2  There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens; a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,

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Tandem wearing

Wearing two babies at once it is fun. You feel a little bit like a pack horse but it can be done.

I am by no means an expert there are many others with a vaster amount of experience than me.

But here are my tips. Little one on the front bigger one on the back. My favourite combo has been a woven wrap on front and a SSC on my back.

Oh look lets be honest I just love these photos and wanted to write a blog post to share them with you.

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Glass Bead Corn uses

I have had a few emails with questions about the glass bead corn that I am growing and selling.  People often ask what it is and how it can be can be used. I figured I should write another post and answer some of the questions as well as explain my hopes for this strain of glass bead corn.

The lady who sold me the initial seeds said that she had been saving a multi-coloured "Aztec" corn and each year was keeping some of the more beautiful seeds and growing them separately to eventually make the glass bead corn variety.  As glass bead corn is a morph of the Aztec corn it is theoretically possible that it may morph back if no selective pressure is maintained for enough generations, but for now the two varieties are very distinct from each other.  I believe that one or more types of popcorn have added their pollen to the mix at some point in time.  I have grown the multi coloured Aztec corn in the past (I was trying to track it down when I found the glass bead corn) and it is easy to see that it and Glass Gem corn are now different varieties.

Glass bead corn seeds

What can Glass bead corn be used for?

Sweet corn: I mentioned in my previous post that glass bead corn can be eaten as a sweet corn - but only if you get the timing right.  Both the Aztec and glass bead corn are a chewier version of sweet corn.  They are apparently sweet but firmer and with a deeper, fuller, more corny taste.  Sweet corn stays tender for about 3 weeks but is far sweeter when cooked within minutes of being picked as the sugars convert to starch reasonably fast.  You probably only get 5 days of tenderness with the glass bead corn before they start toughening up, again they would be sweeter if cooked immediately.  I am yet to eat it as a sweet corn as I am still trying to maintain as much genetic diversity as I can at the moment and selecting cobs after they have dried to hopefully breed it into something more amazing, I discuss that later in this post. 

Corn flour: Glass bead corn is excellent for cornmeal/flour as that is what its main ancestor, the Aztec corn, was bred for.  Yellow corn is relatively low in nutrients, white corn is lower than yellow in a few nutrients, but multi coloured corn is far higher in a host of different nutrients.  Corn flour made from yellow corn is yellow, when made from white corn it is white, when made from multi coloured corn it varies a lot.  While I am told that glass bead corn tastes nicer, I believe that this is due to freshness and the taste is much the same no matter what colour the corn is that made the flour.

Baby corn: Glass bead corn, just like any other variety of corn, can be used as baby corn.  While it will produce a crop of baby corn to use in stir fry or whatever, I think that there are better varieties to use for this purpose.  Varieties that have a shorter growing season, produce more cobs per plant, and grow shorter stalks are probably better suited to this task.

Decorations/teaching: Some people grow glass bead corn as decorations, I love the look of it but some people dislike the look of dry corn hanging on the wall.  As well as decorations some people try to teach genetics with it, personally I think that corn genetics are rather difficult and in depth (especially considering you are working with so many genes from parents of unknown lineage with a mix of alleles that may be dominant, co-dominant, recessive, transposons or retrotransposons etc I think that peas are far simpler for teaching genetics) so would not do this unless you are very confident with what you are doing or do not want to go too deep into the topic.

Popcorn: Glass bead corn can be used as popcorn, but it really isnt a great popcorn yet.  Some cobs clearly have popcorn as one or more of their ancestors as well as the Aztec corn.  I have grown mini blue popcorn in the past and can see several of its traits so figure that it is another of the ancestors of glass bead corn.  Sure a few kernels pop on every cob of glass bead corn, and on some cobs every seed will pop, but the strain that I grow has not been maintained or previously selected for popping ability.  There is wide genetic variation in the population in terms of seed colour, size of cobs, leaf/stalk/sheath/silk/tassel colour, and some cobs pop much better than others.

Glass bead corn - lots of genetic variation

How well does glass bead corn actually pop?

I think that a great popping corn could be selected from the existing gene pool and I am considering selecting and growing only the most colourful and best popping seeds.  But first I wanted to know how well glass bead corn popped in general.

If I chose the best cobs, pretty much all of the seeds will pop just like a variety that has been bred for popping, but that would not yield any useful data.  I wanted to see what percentage of a few random batches of all the seeds would pop.  This would most likely include seeds from the best cobs, seeds from the worst cobs, and seeds from average cobs.  I needed to do a few batches to give me a decent idea of how it pops. 

From randomly selected seeds (poured out of a large jar full of seeds mixed from all the cobs, and then counted) we found that an average of 24 out of 65 seeds did not pop well.  This is not a bad number already, certainly some packets of popcorn from the supermarket pop poorly like this, but it must be better if this is to be considered a good popcorn.

This means that currently only about 37% of seeds do not pop properly, which makes me believe that I can turn this into a beautiful and colourful popping corn in a few generations if I select for the popping trait as clearly the required genes are present. 

Glass bead popcorn - every seed on this small cob should pop

How to select for the popping trait

People ask me how I will turn this strain of glass bead corn into a better popping corn.  I normally tell them it is just by adding some selective pressure and growing the best seeds, many people comment that it sounds difficult.   If you have no interest in saving seeds or selecting corn to pop better the rest of this post is probably not for you and will be boring.

Adding selective pressure is actually a lot simpler than you may think.  Lets face it, whenever you save seeds from anything you are adding selective pressure whether you like it or not, I may as well add selective pressure for excellence in something rather than selecting for mediocrity in everything.  As there are currently no multi coloured popcorn varieties in Australia I may as well select for the popping trait and end up with a beautiful and useful variety of corn.

Firstly grow the seeds and let the cobs dry on the plant as best you can, then remove them and hang them somewhere to complete drying.  Discard any sweet corn seeds, glass bead corn has no sweet corn genes so this step has been done for you many generations ago.  These sweet corn seeds are easy to identify as they are wrinked and shrunken when dry, not firm and round and full like the glass bead corn.  The only way that Glass Bead corn will have any of this is if you or a neighbour are growing sweet corn and the pollen blows over the fence and pollinates your corn.  For anyone who is into genetics you are essentially removing the genes for sugary (SU), sugar enhanced (SE) and supersweet (SH2), once these genes are gone they will not pop up again by themselves.

3 of the darker cobs will pop well, the 2 with more yellow seeds will not

Selection Rules for popping corn

Once you have done that it is important to make some selection rules, mine are like this:

If many seeds on a cob are cracked I dont want to save the cob for seed (unless it has a colour or some other trait I desperately want to keep) and will discard it.  Cracked seeds will not pop as the pressure vessel is weakened or corrupted.  This seed is fine to grind into flour or feed to stock and are not noticeable if eaten at the milk stage (as a sweet corn).

I dont save the cob for seed if many of the kernels have popped on the cob.  This sometimes happens due to rain or irrigation, it is ok for sweet corn, it is fine if you are to grind it into flour, it is not great for animal feed due to lowering the storage time, but it is not a good sign for pop corn.  I normally get rid of the entire cob if any of the seeds have already popped as it appears to be strongly heritable.

Look at how the kernels are arranged on each cob, they need to be as round as possible.  They will not pop if they are flat or squished together.  They will also not pop well if the seed has an indentation on the top or if the kernel is angular instead of round.  Ideally the kernel would be spherical, as this is not possible in corn seeds you aim for the closest possible thing.

Look at each of the remaining kernels closely, if they look glassy and translucent then they probably will pop well, if they are not they tend to be poor at popping and should be removed.  As glass bead corn was created by selecting the prettiest glassy looking seeds of Aztec corn, the genes for glassy looking or translucent kernels are already present in glass bead corn.  The job now is to ensure that each seed is homozygous for glassy alleles and that each generation has a higher percentage of glassy alleles.

Each kernel must not have a deep indentation around the germ.  The germ needs to be small and reasonably indistinguishable if the seed is to pop well.  This trait is highly heritable so should be reasonably simple to select for.  The only down side is that if the germ becomes too small then survivability can be lowered.

If the individual kernels are overly large they will pop ok but will be tough, so I am selecting for regular sized kernels.  Small kernels seem to pop well, but do not give a lot of volume, people tend to want large fluffy popcorn in their bowl.  For this reason I will eventually aim more at growing medium sized kernels, but for now many of the small seeded corn cobs have all of the other traits so I am leaving a lot of them in.

I need to select seeds form a large number of cobs/plants as corn is highly susceptible to inbreeding depression.  Sometimes this will mean that I do not get the best popping corn traits as fast as I want to, but these set backs should only add an extra year or so to the project and ensure that this strain should be easy to continue indefinitely.

After all of this I then try to select for the best colours as well as a wide range of colours.  I have no intention of doing all this work to simply reinvent the wheel and ending up with a new type of yellow pop corn!  I was disappointed over how many yellow seeds are currently in the cobs, for the next few years I will not plant many yellow seeds so that the presence of the yellow allele is lower in the strain.   I also do not want to completely remove the yellow genes, I just want a smaller percentage of plants to carry yellow.

Larger cobs produce more seeds (which means more popcorn per plant), and plants that grow several cobs per plant are better use of space in the vegetable garden, and a shorter growing season means there is less chance for crop failure and more efficient use of vegetable garden space, but these are all secondary traits that are less important than the other traits mentioned above.  These traits can be selected for after the glass bead corn is a good popcorn, if you select for too many things you tend not to make any progress and the choice between what to keep and what to exclude becomes unclear.

After I have applied the selection rules I end up with a bunch of seed that is colourful, glassy looking, and reasonably round.  I then separate this into three batches (one to plant, two to store) to help make certain that I will not lose them if I have a bad year that results in crop failure.  Every seed that is culled or does not make it into storage/planting batches can then be eaten.  Each year I should move the glass gem corn towards being a better popping and more colourful corn.

In a few years we will see how I went, fingers crossed I end up with a refined strain of glass bead corn being an amazing multi-coloured popping corn reasonably quickly.  If that does not work I guess I could cross it with red pop corn and blue pop corn (to incorporate popcorn genes as well as adding some colour) and keep trying, but I have a good feeling that all the genes needed to make this into an amazing popcorn are already present. 

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