Last year I grew this field corn called Painted Mountain. I love multicolored corns, and this one seemed as if it would be good because it is short--only about four feet tall--and it doesn't shade other plants in the garden, and it yields dry ears in 85 days, whereas most field corn requires 100 or more days. I could harvest it in August before I went back to Houston.
But it didn't do very well. The stalks were unhealthy looking, and they yielded few ears. I didn't expect the ears to be big: you can see in the picture that they are small. But some stalks didn't have any ears on them at all.
I think the reason this didn't work well was because in the South, flint corns like Painted Mountain don't thrive as well as dent corns. Dent corns literally have a little dent in each kernel, whereas flint corns don't. So this year I am going back to dent corns.
Painted Mountain was developed in the mountains of Montana, where summers are no doubt cooler and drier than they are in Tennessee.
I did shell out the kernels for cornmeal. I dried them in the oven for a few hours and then ground them. They made a delicious cornmeal. Too bad Painted Mountain is not more productive.
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