Seed Story: Corn Breeding
We wrote a Seed Story about Painted Mountain Corn in our September 2023 newsletter. This month, a story about seed breeding through the lens of Painted Mountain. This corn population is amazing! An incredibly diverse blend of dozens of varieties of corn bred together for 40 years and selected for adaptation to short growing seasons in cold mountain valleys. It’s a true rainbow of diversity.
Corn is one of the most amazing plants to breed. It’s the only plant we know of where you can see the results of cross-pollination in the seed itself, because part of the color is determined not only by the mother plant, but also by the pollen. Corn is highly outcrossing, meaning that populations are large and tend to cross very easily. And, because every corn silk is its own female flower, each kernel on a cob must be pollenated by a different grain of pollen, leading to an enormous amount of diversity within a relatively small population.
In 2023, the Painted Mountain population we were growing produced a single magical ear: deep purple husks and cob with pink-tinged golden kernels. They looked like they were glowing! We’ve been using the children of that single ear to try and breed those traits into our Painted Mountain population while maintaining the genetic diversity that this amazing corn is known for.
We could have just separated out our magic ear of corn immediatly, cutting it off from the population. But that would have been a bottleneck in the diversity, and likely the resilience, of the population. Instead, we’ve been using a method of breending known as “ear-to-row”. When we find these ears that embody our ideal target corn, we keep those kernels separate and plant them in their own row in a block of corn. In 2024 and 2025, we grew 6 rows of Painted Mountain. Two rows were our ideal ears. Two rows were seeded from ears that were similar, but not quite there yet. And the remaining two rows were the rest of the Painted Mountain population, sharing pollen back into our gold/purple rows.
The result has been amazing. The general population is changing slowly: most ears now have at least some purple in their husks, and we are seeing the color range focusing in on the pink/gold spectrum. But there’s still tons of diversity; we’re even seeing entirely new corn types that didn’t exist in the original population, like chocolatey blue kernels on a purple cob. Pictured above are our selections of purple cobs, our ideal ears from 2024, and our working population of kernels from 2025.
While this particular strain of purple-cobbed Painted Mountain is not available to the general public right now, we have sold our “more purple” population of Painted Mountain to our friends at Vibrant Earth Seeds. You can purchase these seeds here, and we’re hoping to release our new variety of corn in the coming years. We’re not in a rush though—we want to make sure we’re breeding not just for color or beauty, but also for resilience.
To become a seed breeding nerd, here are some resources:
• Breeding Organic Vegetables by Rowen White
• Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe