I like to do experiments in the garden and try different things. Last year I grew for the first time Glass Gem corn which you can read about in my post Glass Gem corn. When I harvested it at the end of the 2014 season, I got fantastic colors when I picked it. It truly is a special corn. But of all the many ears of corn with different colors, I got only little 2 ears of a gorgeous pink color which was like no other. I saved the pink kernels and cataloged all the colors i harvested which you can see in my post, Glass Gem corn colors. It was the only corn I grew and no neighbors grew corn so I feel reasonably certain that it is pure. This year in 2015, I decided to grow out those pink kernels and only them. I wanted to see if I would get more pink ones. Now since all the glass gem corn cross-pollinated with themselves, one would think I might get a great mix of colors this year again with such a big genetic pool, but not so.
The majority of the corn was pink! Out of those 2 ears of pink corn (didn’t plant all the kernels), I got 27 ears of corn this year. I got 18 pink (3 not shown). That’s 66%. The pinks were in many different shades of pink as well.
I also got 6 mixed colors with very little pink if any and 3 more that were predominantly pink but had some purple in them too. If you include the other predominately pink ones as well, then that would be 77% of the corn I planted was in the pink family. That astonished me.
So what would happen if I planted the pink that I got this year for next year? Would I then gt 100% pink? Probably not. I think I would have to keep growing it out for about 5 years to keep eliminating any other color genes but it was a great experiment. Now there is something to be said about maintaining diversity. It tends to make stronger strains but I just might try it again next year in 2016 from this year’s corn and see what happens!
giantveggiegardener 
Wow!
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How did it taste and do you sell it at farmer’s market?
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Glass corn is a flint corn which is very hard. You can eat it as popcorn, which I did. The kernels are very small but flavorful. Basically it is an ornamental corn. Ornamental corn is not really an edible corn like sweet corn. People tie or weave the stalks together with several corn ears and display them on a wall. It really is too beautiful to eat.
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Thank you for sharing your results. This is truly a beautiful corn that I have been trying to find for a few years. I love experimenting in the garden, too.
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[…] For instance, I found 2 ears of glass gem corn I grew that were different shades of pink out of many rows of multiple color glass gem corn 6 years ago that I continue to grow to stabilize it. Now there are no other colors other than different shades of pinks. It is now an F5 (fifth generation) so it’s probably pretty stabilized. You can read about it here. […]
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Personally, I am trying to keep the same variety I grew two years ago. This year, however, planting a variety of colors (I think) produced predominately light to navy blue with a tine few pink and black with red. Do you think it is the way it is fed that determines how big the variety of color is?
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I think the color variation is genetic and not determined by growing conditions or the way it is fed.
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