Browse Category: Heirloom

Botanical Report: Growing K’uyu Chuspi Corn (in Southern California)

This video is a botanical report on growing K’uyu Chuspi corn in the Los Angeles area of California. The information presented is meant to be academic in nature. Please the enjoy this report.

If you like to skip ahead to the most interesting part, start at 7:54.
The synopsis of this report is:
K’uyu Chuspi is an ancient corn variety grown in Peru. Its natural climate is in the cooler regions of the Peruvian highlands. Because it is also a rare variety, there is not much information on its growth habit when grown outside its natural environment.

Using the mild winter climate of the San Gabriel Valley (Southern California) as a surrogate for the cool climate of the Peruvian highlands, the corn was sowed on the first day of Fall 2017 (September 22nd).

From 15 seeds grew 11 plants. Of the 11 plants, 4 overcame an unexpected October heatwave. Of the 4 plants, one good sized ear of corn was harvested. With this harvest, we have more seeds to grow with.

Zone 10b / San Gabriel Valley / Los Angeles / Southern California / USA

February 19th, 2015: seed starting

Seed starting 02/19/2015
Seed starting 02/19/2015

The weather has warmed up for a couple of weeks now. Night temperatures have not fallen below 60 degrees. Now there is finally time to start more seeds. While it does not look time consuming, it was a bit of a surprise that this took a over an hour to do. One of the tasks was mixing up the 50/50 soil mixture of clay and peat moss. Then filling up the containers. Continue Reading

Corn holes, Inc.

IMG_7116Keeping a garden is often times similar to running a multimillion dollar company. The difference is that with keeping a garden, often times you are both the consumer, local government, shareholder, CEO, CFO, R&D, logistics, and grunt. There are a slew of other differences. For fun, let us ignore those.

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