A Nearly Extinct Bootlegger's Corn Gets a Second Shot (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A Nearly Extinct Bootlegger's Corn Gets a Second Shot (2018)

npr.org

I love this story.

Wild/forgotten cultivated crop seeds are fascinating to me.

I pick, taste and save as many different wild foods that I can find.

I have found wild chives growing on an island in northern ontario, they're flowering in my backyard right now actually!

I have sampled hundreds of different mulberry trees and saved the best tasting and largest berries to hopefully one day create a mulberry farm.

I have even found a very rare (in my neck of the woods at least) red mulberry tree that flowers and produces fruit all season long. (Whereas most mulberries produce berries once en masse, which ripen towards the end of june or early july). This mulberry produces fruit from june all the way into october/november for some reason.

I found an italian plum tree growing near my house that I picked clean and saved hundreds of pits from last year.

My white whale is a local pawpaw tree that I have yet to find growing anywhere in the local forests, despite many other foragers fruitful finds.

There are delicious fruits all around you. Rosehips are actually quite tasty fruits as well, surprisingly!

Go take a look the next time you're out for a walk and try to figure out what that bulbous berry or fruit is you're looking at. It probably tastes better than you think!

(But don't eat it until you are 100% sure what it is of course!)

> I found an italian plum tree growing near my house that I picked clean and saved hundreds of pits from last year.

Don't all plum trees need to be grafted? I was fairly sure that planting most fruit trees including plums from seeds would mostly result in small sour fruits (and in the case of wild plums from my childhood: almost thorny branches)?

I am quite hesitant to ask since you seem to be quite into this and I only have some superficial knowledge about fruit farming but then again we are here to learn aren't we :-)

I also have only superficial knowledge, but I think you would have to first obtain the "wild" version from the pits, and then graft it to produce edible fruit.

You are correct. Most fruit trees are produced vegatatively by grafting from a proven cultivar.

The naturally pollinated ovule of each resultant seed will inherit characteristics of both parents thus giving a practically certain likelihood of an inedible/undesirable fruit.

In general, you should not expect that growing a fruit seed will yield a plant with similar fruits (if it will grow at all): Most of the fruits we enjoy are carefully bred for good sugar/acid balance, and offspring will mostly be quite different. In addition, most fruit trees are grafted onto stems of other varieties to get better root characteristics.

The nicest counterexample I know of is the danish apple "Filippa", which is a rather acidic apple that stores well (I usually eat my last Filippas early March): This variety can grow from seed and be left on its own root.

Every summer when I went to my grandparents home I would climb up the Guava and Mulberry trees to pick the ripest fruits. My big regret is that the house was sold off to some builder who cut it into smaller houses getting rid of all the lovely trees (there were many, including one I don't know what the English name is). Now I live in an apartment in a city with no hope of being able to recreate this experience for my kids. You can't even buy mulberrys where I live, and Guava is worth gold without the lovely taste. But what really is a Rosehip?

Your warning at the end doesn't seem to square with your willingness to eat new varieties you've never seen or heard of before. How do you know beforehand that whatever mutation caused that Mulberry tree to produce fruit all season didn't also add toxic compounds to the berries? Is this a do as I say not as I do situation?

Mulberry is not a berry, its a composite fruit. There is such a small chance of toxic Mulberry. A little adventure is fine. If you really have to - start by putting the juice on lips, graduate from there, waiting at least a day between next step. When I pick fruits in the wild, I take a really small bite. But really, if I had to grow a Mulberry I would get a professional to do it for me from a known cultivar.

Living is a risk. The chance of toxicity occurring in new plants is possible but quite small, but it's not likely to kill you, just make you sick. Full recovery is highly likely.

Life in perfect safety is not worth much to many people (inc. me), and indeed not possible unless you have a large cushion of money. Your small-c conservatism is fine for you and I won't judge you on it, but please don't expect it of others.

You seem to have misunderstood me as being in favor of perfect safety. I'm happy to eat a weird berry. This was meant as a joke about the excessively careful warning he put at the end of his post and how it didn't seem to jibe with the worldview he was otherwise advocating.

I would suggest trying Wild Garlic (ransoms) [1]. Very common in the UK and very strong garlic flavour.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_ursinum

Mash it into butter and put it on steak. Absolutely delicious. Or make it into a pesto.

> My white whale is a local pawpaw tree that I have yet to find growing anywhere in the local forests, despite many other foragers fruitful finds.

FWIW people hide them next to trees like horse chestnuts and magnolias, both of which have leaflets that look similar from a distance, to prevent folks from taking the fruit. Join your local native plant society, they will hook you up.

Maize has more human induced genetic diversity than any higher order organism.

There are many "heritage" maize varieties grown for various reasons - my favorite is a type of popcorn that grows very small kernels (search for "tinybutmighty popcorn").

That said, this seems like mostly an advertisement for a brand of bourbon whiskey. Most of the specialty maize varieties have a similar origin story, usually with some drama about the "last owner" or "one field left".

Absolutely the best popcorn! I became so obsessed with it that I have my parents smuggle over ten pounds or so every year.

While maize has some of the widest genetic variation Out there, in practice I think it is paradoxically the most frequent monocrop you will see. Lots of genetic options but each field will have almost no genetic diversity.

Would love to try, and love the name! :-)

This video gives a little more info that I found useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3AIJH1oAMY

A brand that I had a hard time trying to track down, by now, unless I wanted a long drive to another state.

Due to the genetic diversity and maize's character as an outbreeder, this variety has already gone through a severe genetic bottleneck due to it having been rescued from only two ears of corn. Generally, in saving maize seed, we look to save seed from a population of at least 100 plants (not ears) to maintain the intrinsic genetic diversity.

So the present-day variety is really not the same as the original variety. Too much of the genetics has been lost.

> Most of the specialty maize varieties have a similar origin story, usually with some drama about the "last owner" or "one field left".

Most of them? You've been seeing tons of these articles about heirloom corn? Show me.

This is common with most heirloom plants -- usually a small cluster lives on somewhere. I find it hard to believe it's an ad for whiskey when it's written by NPR; if anything, it's NPR trying to find southern farm news to appeal to certain parts of the US that would otherwise be outside of the NPR demographic.

Cool story.

I have a similar interest in barley for brewing. I like to find heritage or land race varieties to try.

I often use Maris Otter[1], which is quite easy to obtain. However, others like Hana[2] and Chevallier[3] can be more difficult to buy.

Scottish Bere[4] is another grain I'd like to try, but haven't been able to find any for sale, either whole grains or malted. Seems like only flour is available.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maris_Otter

[2] https://crispmalt.com/news/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-hana-...

[3] http://zythophile.co.uk/2013/04/15/revival-of-ancient-barley...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bere_(grain)

I was planning to grow a small amount of bere this year through a seed sovereignty program here in Scotland. Lockdown disrupted that, and the seeds didn’t arrive. Hopefully next year.

IIRC Simpson's Malts do a line of Chevallier malts.

eta: I may have misinterpreted... If it's malt you're seeking, maybe my comment helps. If it's grain for growing, I'd love to talk seed-swapping if you do lay hands on any.

I know Crisp do sell Chevallier when available, but I didn't know about Simpsons.

I was specifically talking about malt, but I would be happy enough with a supply of grain and can then do my own maltings.

I bought a bottle of Jimmy Red bourbon from High Wire for a coworker (I got super lucky - it was one of maybe a dozen left), and he reported that it had a lot of flavor -- very natural tasting, and not like anything that comes out of a production distillery.

As much as Tito deserves his success, calling his vodka "handcrafted" is a major stretch when you've got a spirit like this that has true heritage behind it.

"The last known bootlegger growing the corn died, and the corn almost died with him. Two ears were rescued from his plot and gifted to celebrated local farmer and seed saver Ted Chewning, with the suggestion that he grow it out for his hogs."

I'm sure the corn is indifferent... but from a genetic survival/propagation-games perspective something about a guy called Ted being chief savior tickles me. What lore would the corn write about Ted if it could. What commandments would Ted put forth.

Ted 10-17: thou shalt save the forgotten seed.

[2018]

Gravy, the podcast, did a piece on this corn as well: https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy/a-taste-of-place-whis...

Wow, fantastic color.

Corn of this type would be useful in decorating Mitchell, South Dakota's "World's Only Corn Palace".

Each year, the Corn Palace (a huge building) is decorated on the outside with colorful murals, all made of corn.

If you can't visit for real, consider making a virtual visit:

https://cornpalace.com/

There's a market power story here. If one grows a perishable crop, like onions (or even hogs, in countries with centralised meatpacking), one is at the mercy of the markets that season. If one can store the crop (corn->bourbon, poppies->opium, etc.) then, for the price of the processing, one has a lot more options about when to sell and can attempt to get better prices.

(I live in a jurisdiction where people come around the villages with stills on trailers, and will distill your excess fruit production. Some farmers even leave their extra bottles on a table in the farmyard, with a box for the money when we non-farmers stop by to buy some)

Ordered a pound of it this year and got some growing in the garden right now. Got it from a uncontaminated, heirloom, non-GMO grower in Alabama: https://raileyfarmandfield.com/shop/jimmy-red-corn-seed

I had a hard time with this title wondering how a bootlegger goes nearly extinct.

It's still messing with my head a bit every time I look at it, but my head is probably more easily messed with today than normally.

Kerning on the font for the title here on HN makes it look like it says Com. It's weird though, because in the comments it doesn't look that way. Corn.

I think it is a Verdana thing. Title is 13px, comments are 12px. Increasing the font to 13 does the same thing to comments.

I'm growing bloody butcher corn in my garden. It looks similar. I have a ton of seeds if anyone would like some.

Hey, I love to trade seeds! I've got all sort of hot peppers. E-mail me at robb at rs dot io ? Other HNers welcome, too.

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