Amanda Palmer Corn as Human food!

It's a nice thought to share the same thing for breakfast that your livestock are enjoying! Wow, never really thought I'd say that, but I did.

We have been cooking quite a bit with our new Amanda Palmer composite field corn variety. Grits of all types, mush, cornbread (torillas and other products still to come this fall and winter) and are really loving the unique and rich flavor of this wonderful corn. We have noticed that the Tuxpeno germplasm gives us something very unique in terms of flavor when ground with the other components of Amanda Palmer, something we can't quite put our finger on, but this meal differs in many substantial ways from flint, flour, or dent corn meal.

The interesting thing is I'm usually not a big fan of cornbread, but this cornbread gives me something to get excited about, I had noticed a somewhat semi sweet flavor in the ground meal as I first began processing it, presuming a good portion of it had been imparted by the inclusion of Daemon Morgans Kentucky Butcher corn which seemed in many instances to show the phenotype and characterestics of a corn carrying the SU7 gene, but grinding pure Kentucky Butcher doesn't give near the same results. The meal from Amanda Palmer retains mostly a yellow coloration with flakes of red and blue and ocassionally pink in the mixture and creates a wonderful smelling, nutty flavored, and fantastically textured corn bread wonderful for all ocassions. We even made a bit of dessert cornbread by adding a few chocolate chips to the mix here and there and Kim had the foresight the other night while making vegetable stew from scratch to include some fantastic cheddar cheese spread in a thin layer on top of the cornbread mix and then covered with a slight layer of mix. How wonderful it is indeed.

The grits come out wonderfully sticky and a bit chewy, the way I like them to be, they are fantastic with just a small amount of salt and pepper with a piece of cheese on top or used as a breakfast cereal with a bit of honey and cinnamon.

For those who will make it out to the seed swap this Saturday we will be bringing a pan or two of this special cornbread with us and will have plenty of seed available as well.

Amanda Palmer corn updates.

Finally finished cleaning corn seed for the year. The shear amount of Amanda Palmer ears we chose to clean for seed by hand shelling was daunting in and of itself, particulary when pilled onto the daily list of chores to do on the farm on top of preparing for fall and winter, planting and harvesting other seeds, researching new varieties and histories all while trying to find time to build a new shed for farm equipement and cut fire wood.

All in all we produced well over 100 lbs of seed for this season. We have also been hand grinding grits and meal from this corn as well as shelling it as the primary food stuff for our turkey genepool, rabbits, and goats. I can't even begin to explain the amount of respect I have for the Native Americans and later settlers who ground their own corn. Even with the convinience of a modern hand cranked sheller, grinding corn by hand is no easy prospect; four times through the mill for grits, five times for meal, and it's still a bit "gritty". But the taste is fantastic, rich, nutty, real corn flavor, the addition of Tuxpeno germplasm adds something that I just can't quite pinpoint at the momnent in terms of taste. Right now the freezer is stacked with over 50 lbs of meal and grits and we had a wonderful serving of Amanda Palmer grits with fried rabbit last night, some of the best grits I've ever had, certainly better than anything you'll ever find at the store.

I'm also exceptionally pleased with the agronomic performance of this new synthetic population, lots of strong, stiff stalks, many prolific (2 ears or more stalks), large ears, good cool and wet soil germination, and excellent drought tolerance. Granted this is the first year for the inter maraige of these varieties, but the potential for some truly amazing future varieties is here. This is the field corn sister of my Astronomy Domine sweet corn. I've noticed a definite preference by the turkeys for red kernels and tuxpeno influenced kernels, more to come on that soon.

Above you can also a pic from last week of the corn crib, it's a bit more full than that now, the storage room for the corn/feed alone makes all the trouble of taking it down and putting it back up well worth while, later this fall we will be buying about 20-40 bushels of OP corn from a friend. Next season we hopefully will not have to buy any supplimentary feed.

Our goal is to allow the Amanda Palmer genepool and the Kiva turkey genepool to co-evolve with one another. Feeding the turkeys and ourselves the corn, recycling the cobs into turkey bedding, composting the bedding and manure, using the compost for AP fertilizer, and saving the seeds from AP for replanting, eating the turkeys; this is true self sufficient farming.

In the top picture you can see an outstanding Edamame Soybean selection which showed outstanding production qualities, we have been saving seed from our huge Edamame grex over the past few days as well, selecting the most productive and disease tolerant plants we find, we have been in drought for the last month and a half so drought tolerance and stress is already there and these were planted on completely unamended red clay, so low soil fertility is also automatically selected for. I also snaped a quick picture of one of the Rio Grande wild turkeys checking things out while I pick the edamame pods.

Evaluating and storing corn seed.

Pictured above are from top to bottom: New blue clamp down barrels for long term, waterproof seed storage. Until we get a new root cellar/storm shelter built this fall/next spring two of these with large duplicate samples of our new varieties and some of the rarer Open Pollinated types will find their way into the ground for long term seed storage.

Second: drought stressed and low fertility stressed, but viable and incredibly diverse Astronomy Domine sweet corn

Third: Amanda Palmer (early variant) seed ears. Shelled these off for seed earlier today, got a huge blister on my thumb as a reward as well as about 20 lbs of seed. Two more later variant patches and a pure UK tuxpeno patch still are standing waiting to be evaluated for seed and harvested for turkey feed stored in the new corn crib.

Still wanting to trade corns, read posts below this one for the downlow.

What was I doing on those 100 degree days?

Building a corn crib! Or, should I say, rebuilding one that Kims father (Dale Ratts) and I took apart and moved here. I honestly don't know what was more of a pain in the ass, taking it down which involved grinding all of the nuts off of the two main seams with a cutting wheel on a grinder (which proceeded to give me an sinus infection which put me down for a week in the spring) and driving it home on a trailer that was two sizes too small, or putting it back up, realizing how little leway there was for rebuilding it given it wasn't built quite straight in the first place and was bowed from being unlevel. It was one thing to get the walls up, quite another to make the roof work just right while also smoldering in the oven that is the walls of this behemouth on a one hundred degree plus couple of days! Either way, I have a corn crib, and if your going to be a corn breeder or a sustainable turkey farmer/breeder you have to have one! I should easily be able to accomidate 500 bushel here.


I've also been spending a lot of time hand harvesting the Tuxpeno/Southern Dent component of the new Amanda Palmer synthetic/composite/landrace corn(s). Last Friday I hand harvested close to an acre of this valuable new genepoos which will undoubtably give rise to several new, interesting, and useful lines, both for human and animal consumption. The tuxpeno components matured and dried down the quickest of all with lots and lots of genetic diversity including tuxpeno, semi-dent, semi-flint, dent, and flint variations and lots of colors.

Harvesting and shucking by hand as I walk down the rows is quite an experience, the knowledge gained cannot be underestimated even given the heat and humidity. Doing this work by hand puts me back in touch with the earth and gives me a whole new respect for the entity that is corn and the uniqe symbosis that exists between corn and humans and the role that corn and other grains have played in our 10,000 years of agricultural civilization. This also gives me an opporotunity to test every plant in the plot for agronomic traits I might miss by using a corn picker or having my crop combined. I litterally touched and tested and observed every plant in the field and every kernal on the cobs, looking for those traits which would lend it most easily to self sustainable organic agriculture; drought tolerance, standability, production, and more. The seed was planted exceptionally early this year on April 5'th in cold and wet conditions, the stands were full giving me access to a plethora of traits for cool/wet soil germination and tolerance, it also survived at least two frosts early in the season. This also gives the opporotunity to eliminate any molds or fungus from the corn crib prior to it's introduction to that important cache of feed and seed. It would be my guess that the value of the gnosis (knowledge) gained in this intensive environment would have to be equal to 10 years of harvesting and open pollinated corn by way of a picker (and making mass selection from a corn crib) or a lifetime of growing F1 hybrids or gmo's and harvesting via combine. Did I mention we also hand planted it and hand side dressed it with turkey compost which we hand turned on the farm? It doesn't get any more intensive or sustainable than that! The seed that doesn't make the cut now becomes animal feed and the cobs become bedding for the turkey coops. There are still two acres of corn left to harvest. Those ears in the floor of the corn crib are secondary yellow ears of Astronomy Domine as I have not yet got a picture up of the first haul of "feed" corn that is currently drying in the crib, those hung on the wall are "Amanda Palmer" seed donors which meet my expectations, mind you, only from one of the three interbreeding plots.

Next year we will persue both seed to row breeding plots and further mass selection, some of the flint derrivitives will be frozen for future research into sustainable flint lines.

I personally feel that the genetics preserved in these stocks are more than adequate to develop germplasm adaptable to global warming (whether man made or natural) or global cooling. As well we will be making selection based on taste in polenta, grits, flour, parching and more but the ultimate use of this corn as an adaptavar feed for our turkeys.

This particular genepool is made up of a number of corn parents, mostly southern dents and northeastern flints but also a very valuable day length neutral lowlan tuxpeno variety. Bloody Butcher, Reids Yellow Dent, Lancaster Surecrop, Cherokee White Eagle, Daemon Morgans Butcher, Boone County White, Johnson County White, Hickory King Yellow, and UK Tuxpeno make up the majority of the pollen contributions.

Seed will be available this fall via the Face Of The Earth Seed CSA and we will update photos and info as we continue to harvest into the fall.