Selecting for traits in corn

Good afternoon,

I'm curious to know, how many different lines of corn do you pros maintain, & what your thinking is behind separating a line for certain traits.  For example, I'm currently growing an early cold hardy sweet corn, & on one hand, wanted to select for the best traits for this variety to separate & improve it.  On the other hand, I may add some of the average/typical genetics to my sweet corn mix, crossing with longer DTM varieties to theoretically bring them more inline with mid season varieties to get better mingling of pollen on the most silks mid season.  What are your thoughts?

What is the collective opinion on corn with stalk tillering?  Is it a good thing that you get more root strength and more ears, or is it a bad trait to select against due to later ears not filling out?  I've read that it's undesirable if you machine harvest, but that's not a concern for me.  I can imagine if you have a mix of corn varieties that pollinate later, you'll still get full late ears, but not sure if it's worth it?

I’m a novice trying to learn more about growing corn, this year I have three heritage varieties, separated by planting time.

I like your idea of letting some of the corn cross; the beginning of a landrace.  Maybe hand- pollinate certain ears if you want to keep some true to type, or to keep track of the crossing.

As far as the tillers, maybe in ideal conditions they would produce mature cobs. Perhaps you could selectively save seed from plants that had successful tillers and end up with a multi-stalk corn variety.

I've considered keeping seed from the most productive tillers as a fun side project,  but if I keep this up, I'll have more varieties than I can keep viable before the seed goes bad.  I have the desire,  but simply don't have the space to develop all the varieties that I want to.  So, for the time being, I'm going to focus on about 4 varieties.

Update time!  

I made the first harvest of my early, cold hardy sweet corn on July 4th, which was one of my goals with this crop.  The 90 or so survivors of the cold & wet germination period did very well overall, with strong stalks, 2+ ears per plant, about 4 foot height, and very good heat tolerance with most of the summer being around 100 degrees.  As far as plant health for seed saving, I'm very happy with the results.  

However, what I'm not happy with, is the severe corn earworm & whiskey bug damage to the tip of every ear.  While this isn't as big of a problem with larger ears, I lost about a third of every ear to the worms.  This variety has 12 rows on a 7-8 inch cob, so it doesn't take much damage to reduce yield significantly.  I didn't treat the silks with anything because I'm trying to breed for natural resistance (wondering if this is even possible).  Most of the ears were well husked, but where the silks entered still allowed the worms in.  Also, the whiskey bugs simply bored a hole through the side of the husk & entered the sugary feast alongside the ear worms.  I even had a few cobs where the ants got their fill of my golden sweetness.  

Unfortunately, as soon as I got my first silks & pollen dropping tassels, I had to leave the plot unattended for about 2 weeks.  There were different sizes of earworms, so it looks like multiple hatchings occurred.  

I did plant an overlapping crop of other varieties 2 weeks ago, but I lost a fair amount of seed to rodents.  We'll see if any of these have what it takes to repel the earworms.

Anyone know of a good sweetcorn variety with tight husks that I can try?