Blog Post #2

Welcome back for another blog post from Poly (culture) Pocket!

With this post, we're diving into what we accomplished in our very first lab class. After a fantastic tour of the teaching garden's facilities, we were assigned together as a group to begin to craft our garden plans. We had some big decisions ahead of us. Choosing just a handful of crops to plant given the long list of veggies was no easy task, but we managed to narrow our selections down to the following

1. Corn - and lots of it! We decided to plant two cultivars of corn including Hickory King White and Indian
2. Pumpkins 
3. Tomatoes
4. Bell peppers
5. Banana peppers

While this isn't the final list of what we'll be growing, we needed to begin planting our seeds in the greenhouse so they would be all set to transfer in the following weeks. Working in the greenhouse was a blast! We filled containers with soil and planted our variety of seeds. Afterward, we gave them a good watering, created some makeshift labels, and crossed our fingers for a solid start. 

And that's a wrap for day 1!  Stay tuned for more updates and to watch our little garden grow!

Photo captions (left to right, down to up):

1. This was the table in the greenhouse where we planted our dent-type corn, Hickory King White. Since dent corn was developed by crossing varieties of flint and flour corn, kernels have a somewhat softer epidermal layer. Whereas the flint-type kernels almost felt like pebbles, we found that dent kernels were a bit more pliable to the touch when planting.

2. Here you can see some of the Indian corn kernels planted in one of our seed starter trays. Flint corn, to which group the corn in the photo belongs, earned its name due to the very hard outer layer protecting the tissue of the epidermis. This structural soundness makes uncooked Indian corn very difficult to chew without first being ground.

3. These are the seeds for the Indian-type variety we planted in our plot. We were really impressed with both the assortment of colors and the complex streaks on many of the seeds. Differences in the coloration of Indian corn are due to varying amounts of a pigment called anthocyanin in the kernel tissues.

4. We are planting two main varieties of corn, Hickory King White and a generalized Indian variety (no specific cultivar name given). One of our main objectives is to determine whether there are any noticeable differences in growth rate between the two types of kernels. Since these seeds belong to two different types of corn, dent and flint, it will be interesting to see if they mature at a similar rate.