From the archives: Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm in Gaston, Oregon shares some of his near encyclopedic knowledge of the different varieties of heirloom corn.
Transcript:
Just wanted to take a minute to talk about the different types of corn, it's amazing diversity is probably has the greatest diversity of any of the grains. And it's it's a it's an intriguing plant because the corn we know evolved in a corn in a, in a continent, without steel, and without draught animals. So, it evolved, by hand, hand in stone is what I would say it's very easy it's great for the backyard gardener. It's one grain that can grow much more easily in backyard than European grains that grew, you know that evolved with the size and width draft them, animals, and that is a huge difference and you see that in all of the, the American vegetables or pretty much all of them. The sweet potatoes the potatoes, the tomatoes and peppers you see this amazing diversity, because your hand selecting your fruits your hand selecting your greens, you're looking at them and you spit the ponder them that's why corn is wonderful because you can hand select it, we have here a very dark purple husk one these can be used for dyeing fabrics, the husks on these. This was just an off type growing out in the field as the only year of its sort in the field of blue corn that I had growing here. So this is it this is a flower type corn This is a Dent Corn. And then corns and make a sticky, sticky polenta on mash. They're commonly used for animal feed these are different types of popcorn. This is Cochiti Pueblo, which is a very very diverse take this is Amish butter which we drove for popcorn. It's a sharp pointed type, what's called the right screen. And it makes also great cornmeal. And then this is called Pink Beauty we've grown this in the past. This one is such a wonderful dual purpose corn that we grow it and install both popcorn and white grits because people love white grits, and this is the first year, we're going to be trying some of these old open pollinated kernels. And the thing about these these are on sweet corn. Open pollinated sweet corn. What's neat about sweet corn is it doesn't go into the full starch synthesis. So, it shrinks down dramatically and they're always wrinkled they always have this wrinkled kernel, and this is an old test corn called Black Aztec or black Mexican.
There's another one is called Rainbow Inc and these will be sweet corn fields, you'll be able to roast them or cook them over boil them up. Eat them on the summer’s eve. This is RainbowInca it's got all sorts of types in that one. Then we get into the flint corns and these are the ones we typically grow here because they're very very short season. And you can see the range of of Flint, this is a more flowery type came from the Great Lakes area. The Seneca nation. This is called White Cap is a very old variety from Rhode Island from the east coast, and the white ones are almost always associated with fish eating cultures, they go well with fish. They also great with lamb but. And then, this is what we'll be planting today. And this is called Roy’s Calais Flint. And it's more of a library of genetic types than an actual variety. It's an eight row Flint. So, these are the old New England 8 row Flint's in Connecticut in 1924 they did, they did some research and they and they were growing, I believe was 72 different types of plant corn in the state of Connecticut alone. One of the most productive corn states at that time, it's been since been taken over by the Corn Belt for Connecticut was actually a very, very productive coronary, and this is called rice calcium deficit and this is a plant a hard green corn, that makes a superb corn meal. So I just want to explain these things first and people sort of can see the range.
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