Victor Kucyk 2175, HGS

Victor Kucyk is a corn breeder of the old style, combing existing traits from varieties of corn to develop open pollinated variable strains that you can then reselect and adapt to your own area.

Funny, but this was how corn used to be developed before the age of gene manipulation, monocropping, federal government subsidized farming, herbicides, pesticides, and anti-biotic based animal production.  There is a combination of genes that will be exactly what works best in your area.

Michel Lachaume sent me last year a small bag of about 400 seeds simply labeled Victor Kucyk 2175.  I had run across the name before online when researching old-style corn development on Dave Christensen’s work on Painted Mountain corn.  After blogging on the corn, and an email sent to Victor, I received a call from him and had an opportunity to learn a bit more about this variety.  He crossed a shorter season dent flour corn with a bunch of northern variety flint corns, then hybridized that with Painted Mountain, which gives a current gene pool that is 50% Painted Mountain, but instead of the short plants typical of Painted Mountain, gave me 8-10′ tall plants with cob set well above raccoon and mouse predation levels.

Although all of the colors found in Painted Mountain are evidenced in various kernels on the ears, for the greater part they are various shades of red, orange and yellow.  Most cobs are dents, but a few were flour (undented) and there is some of the flinty translucence and shine you would expect from a flint.

The tasseling was fairly early, though the maturity was a bit variable.  By 65 days the plants were at full height, by 70 they were showing cobs, and by 80 I had some full ears, but the fully matured cobs with husks drying were anywhere from 90 to 105 days.

For my own purposes, I have only saved deliberate seed from the best of my first picking of it, being those that matured to dry in 95 days or less.  They ranged from a single 8 row cob (bottom right) which was the first cob to dry down (likely due to the thin core) to 16 rows of kernels.  There were some with as much as 22 rows, but they dried down later and did not mature as quickly.  They also tended to be shorter cobs.  Minimum cob length that I saved was 6″ and the longest was 11″.

All of the seed saved was center-cob, with the ends and butts ending up with all of the culled cobs for cornmeal.  I have about 4 pounds of seed to plant next year which should do about a quarter acre planting.  Lance Ness and I are going to try it at a new spot at his place for the next attempt (after a disaster and loss of nearly all of my Bear Island Flint seed) to become self sufficient on the livestock side of providing for ourselves.

I selected all of this early morning, sipping coffee and just admiring the beauty of the cobs.  My daughter Nell awoke, came out to the kitchen for a cup of tea, (chamomile, mint and monarda from our garden) and then proceeded to help me shell all of the ears while visiting with me.  One of my favorite types of mornings.It took us three hours to do all of the cobs, which is not too bad.  I cut the tops off of paper grocery bags to shell into and we filled a half dozen up with clean kernels.  There were some cobs that were insect damaged, or had moisture issues (both most likely due to adverse husk development) which were all set aside for the chickens.  All of the rest of the culled cobs are now shelled and finishing drying and hardening down.  Once they have, we will store them for the winter, making cornbread, muffins, stews, soups and polenta.

Going to need to bring the corn mill up from the basement soon.  <smile>

This entry was posted in Corn, Food, Gardening, Harvest, Processing, Storing. Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Victor Kucyk 2175, HGS

  1. Jim Conley says:

    interested in touching base, perhaps seed buyer for this year

    • Tom says:

      Was good talking to you. I am interested to see where you take this variety.

    • Rosma says:

      My hasnubd and I are like your hasnubd when it comes to eating corn. Every once in a while we will have what we call our summer dinner. Corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes. Your creamed corn sounds wonderful, especially with the pancetta. I use the microwave for the corn as well. I clean it, cover with plastic wrap and cook.

  2. Rams Fan says:

    You need to compose a weblog about 2012 and when the world will end, I love to listen to people’s several perspectives on this There is nuts stuff happening inside the world right now so who understands if 2012 will be the finish.

  3. Marcos says:

    I bought that corn steirppr when Julia got braces and could eat it on the cob. It’s amazing! I don’t think I could go back to canned creamed corn. It doesn’t measure up and it defies the whole seasonal eating principle

  4. Rob Wagner says:

    This must be the corn that “Cortona” (his user handle) in Italy was telling me about. Michel Lachaume sent him some.

    He’s trying to use it in projects related to developing corn that will tolerate his climate, which goes from fairly cold (by Italian standards) to very hot, and dries out in summer.

    I’d like to learn more about breeding corn. I’m curious what the difference is between our farmer’s field corn, which grew faster than ours and is much deeper green, than ours is, under identical conditions. Obviously hybrid vigor, but Tom suspects there are some other, non-GMO traits that have been bred into modern commercial corns, not existing in traditionally-bred corns.

    Bearing in mind too that the farmer’s corn was developed for more ideal conditions than ours. It’s NOT locally-adapted, but still significantly outperformed ours. I think ours would win only under the worst conditions. Ours does bloom earlier and dries down fast enough to harvest fully viable; the commercial field corn does not; the farmer could not raise his own seed if he wanted to (and it were legal, which it wouldn’t be), at least, not dependably so.

    • Tom says:

      Bunkie, east of you, is growing this corn this year and by all reports it is doing well when corn really never has previously. Hopefully it produces well before the frosts and winter come and it will be something she can grow every year. It would be nice for them to have a corn that produces there and is OP so it can acclimate to exactly what does well there.

  5. I am very happy that people are breeding new lines using my Painted Mtn Corn! Painted Mtn will definitely give any cross much faster maturity and ear length. People around the world are creating many useful crosses from it. I love to hear what people are doing.

    I have many side projects on larger scales than you, creating lines to cross to Painted Mtn. One is a modern line for stalk strength, which I am also putting the Fl2 gene into for protein quality. None of them will be uniform enough to share for a few years. It takes decades to get the right genes in and the unwanted genes out.