I grow my first corn this year and I am very happy about this because it’s a special corn. My corn is a greek traditional variety and I found 8 corn kernels from a local small organization.

I gave 2 corn kernels in a neighbor and  I have sown the 6 of them. I have sown the seeds in small containers because I wanted to save time. Now I have 4 corn plants and I will go to the plot next week to transplant them.

I know the corn plant don’t like transplanting but I couldn’t do anything else because I usually sow my seeds in city and transplanting the plants in plot when I have time to travel there.

I live in a mediterranean hot country which is dry in summer and here people of past  used to separate the plants from the way of  watering needs. So in corns they had seeds for “watered plants” (ποτιστικά) and  seeds for “non-watered plants” (ξερικά). They used to separate the plots with the same way.

As you can understand I was searching corn seeds which can grow without watering and I was lucky! This is the reason that these seeds are precious for me. They don’t have a special name like the most heirloom, here you will not find names in traditional seeds usually, the better you can find is the area which they used to grow a plant.

Traditional corn seeds are rare now. People in villages grow hybrids the last 30 years (at least) and forgot the traditional varieties. The organization I told you before, began from a man who travel around the small villages to collect old local seeds from old people. Most of the times old people were illiterate (they grow in war times) so nobody had the request to know the names of the varieties.

Now my aim is to multiple the traditional corn seed. I hope for some rains in summer. The good part is that in the area of my plot nobody grows corn and is safe area for cross-pollination problem.

In Greece we don’t sow GM Corn until now and we resist the EU pressure for the opposite. I don’t know how many years we will continue resist. Some years before  Syngenta Hellas και Pioneer Hi Bred Hellas sell  GM Corn seeds to some farmers by “mistake”. The ministry of agriculture when found it command to destroy those plants and the companies press the farmers to sign some papers if they wanted some money (not so much) for the damage. A part of these paper wrote:

“The company may use this contract legally and officially in order to demonstrate the availability of this lot is no damage caused. In the event that the producer go before the courts and request any amount as compensation will cause everything is regulated by the moment, are parties, as present and represented that state in permissible procedural agreement, the company will provide this agreement before the court and the court action will be dismissed as unfounded. If, however, any amount awarded to the producer, then from now agreed hereby that the farmer assigns this sum to the company”

Some farmers sign the paper and some other they don’t sign. But after that all of them went to court and they wait until now for the judgement.