Lisl and I planted two rows of corn in the Stone House garden in June. My row was a variety of sweet corn given to me at a seed exchange last winter by a lady from Two Harbors. Darlene grew up in the Philippines learning to garden for food. Growing her own food in Minnesota isn't the same thing at all, but she tries everything anyway and sticky corn is one of her favorite things.

Lisl's row was a fun variety of corn from Bakers Seed called Painted. She wanted to see the colors.

Those two rows, side by side, grew and grew and grew, very tall, kinda of like Jack's bean stock, while summer got busy. Everybody else's corn tasseled and made ears, but ours just kept growing. Finally at about fifteen feet or more there began to be tassels, sort of. Meanwhile, we bought or begged roasting ears from more ordinary corn patches.

Lisl gathered up her few painted corn ears one day late this fall. Ok, I suppose it was dumb of us, but she was surprised when some of the ears were painted sweet corn with a few yellow kernels mixed in. I found the few ears from my row were all sweet corn, but not really edible with painted kernels mixed in.

Lisl has chicken genetics down pat. She knows which varieties of rooster and hens produce which certain color of eggs. I went with her one day to buy a special expensive dozen of eggs for hatching. She knew what she wanted and 75 dollars was not too much money for said dozen of eggs. I personally think that people who get eggs from Lisl's little homestead ought to know how much planning and tlc goes into creating those beautiful eggs. No wonder we keep them in baskets on the counter top. They're so pretty. And they're good breakfast eggs.

All that to say, we maybe ought to be smarter about plant genetics next time we plant garden.

We're both wondering what will we get if we plant some of the corn seeds we've saved this fall. I'm just curious enough to try. I really wanted to enjoy Darlene's sticky corn. I still do.