Wanted to share and document progress on a popcorn variety I’ve been working on. I started with Calico popcorn from Fedco seeds, and noticed some stalks with purple kernels, ears, and cobs, and some ears with purple kernels, but none with all purple. I like purple vegetables, and decided to try to select for the whole package, despite being sick of purple from living in Manhattan, KS.
Since I didn’t have any with purple stalks, ears, cobs, AND kernels, I had to save seeds with purple kernels and seeds from purple stalks. Even after one season, the color change in the kernels was dramatic. 2015 harvest (left) and 2016 (right):
I still didn’t have any with the whole suite of traits, so I selected as before. Here’s last year’s harvest (3rd generation, moving across country made me miss a couple seasons):
Less dramatic of a change, but still good. Also, I finally have purple kernels on purple plants! I kept a small % of purple seeds from plants that just had reddish or purplish streaking to maintain diversity, but I think it should go much faster now. Oddly, I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of the stalks, ears, or cobs.
Now, the really exciting thing is when I started popping this year’s harvest, some of them popped with a streak of purple in them! This is by far the best one:
I thought that this was supposed to be impossible, so I’m pretty stoked. Of course, this is from the part I didn’t save for seed, so fingers crossed that trait continues to show up in my quest for all purple all the time.
