Teosintes growing in Ohio

I grew some teosintes this year to see if it would make it and it did.  Here are some pics.  The stock is like corn with heavy air roots.  The base is like corn.  The mini ears are like ears of wheat with a mini cover like corn.  There is a bunch of ears per ear section and multiple ear sections. It looks like I will have plenty of grain per stock.

That is pretty cool. I'm curious to know how long the growing season is/was.

What do you do with it please?

Hi Michael, I planted it the first weekend in June and took these pictures this past week. I think that is about 19 weeks.  We have had some light frost the last month and it pulled through it.  It had tassels at the end of August.  I wish I would have checked it earlier to see when the seeds started to form, but I didn't know where they were until the other day.  This is all new to me.  I like to study this kind of thing.  

John, I plan on experimenting with small scale silage and chicken feed with it.  The kernels are hard and taste like corn/starch.  I am always looking at different ways and types of feed to diversify the homestead. I planted some on the wet bottom field and I planted some in the high dry ground.  I can't see any difference in how the grew.

Christopher Shepherd wrote:I grew some teosintes this year.

Curious about two things.

What do you use teosintes for?

What is your black ground cover for?

Are you growing/seeding underneath, weed prevention with bare dirt rows for spring/summer, winter weed prevention?

Guess I didn't scroll down far enough to see answer on usage you already posted.

Next questions.

Where do you buy seed?

Do you think/know if most of it is eatable/desired by chickens? Ours are pretty spoiled on leftover year-round garden greens.

Hi Molly.  I bought it off eBay.  If I remember right it was from New Mexico.  Anther thing I plan on using it for is cross breeding.  I need to do more research for that.  I have been told the air roots still have nodules to attract bacteria to make nitrogen like a legume.  This is just something I wanted to study. The black tarp is a prep strip for strawberries in the spring.  We prep the year before so we have less weeds and the ground gets warmer quicker.  It just so happened to be the best place to take a contrast picture.

We use a huge amount of diversity feeding chickens.  I want to test this and see what it has in it.  Our other lines of corn have up to 2% more protein than standard hybrids.  They also have a bunch of beta carotene.

I hope others are experimenting with some old lines of stuff too.  This year we added, yellow amerenth, and nicotiana rustica to our system too.  Amaranth for more amino acids and rustica is for bug control.

Christopher Shephard:

all good info, thanks