This is Glass Gem corn.
My husband grew these. Aren’t they absolutely beautiful? I had never seen corn like this before, so of course, I had to do some research and I found out the Glass Gem corn went viral in 2012 after a picture of it was posted on Facebook.
The whole story behind Glass Gem corn is pretty colorful, actually.
It all started when an Oklahoma farmer named Carl Barnes, who was half-Cherokee, began growing older corn varieties as a way to get back in touch with his Native American roots. In the process of growing these older corn varieties, he started to save seeds from some of the most colorful corns he came across.
He’d plant the seeds he’d selected and as time went on, his efforts resulted in rainbow-colored corncobs. Barnes died in 2016, but fortunately, before he died he had made friends with another farmer named Greg Schoen. Barnes gifted Schoen with some of the rainbow corn seeds and Schoen began growing them himself.
At first, Schoen didn’t grow much of the multi-colored corn, but in 2005 he took it up a notch and started growing more of the colorful variety next to the regular kinds of corn we’re all used to seeing. Over the years, as the rainbow corn mixed with the traditional corn, new strains of successively more colorful corn would grow. Schoen would name the different strains as they came along and chose the name Glass Gem for a variety that looks like translucent jewels of bluish green and pinkish purple.
As for how the corn went viral in 2012 …
In 2010, Schoen was in the process of moving and wanted to safeguard some of his seeds so he passed some on to Bill McDorman, who at the time was the Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH. At some point, McDorman grew some of the seeds, was blown away by the beautiful corn that grew from them, a picture made its way onto Facebook, the internet went CRAZY for this gorgeous corn and people wanted to buy seeds.
You can now buy the Glass Gem seeds from Native Seeds/Search.
We will be making popcorn with our corn as opposed to eating it off the cob because it has a hard outer layer. And when you pop it, it is no longer colorful; it ends up looking like regular popcorn.
Have you ever seen any of this corn in person?
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