Painted Mountain Corn
The beautiful Painted Mountain corn is a metaphor for our times, blending together different seeds to create something new and beautiful. Painted Mountain was bred by Dave Christensen in Montana over 20 years ago. He crossed a huge variety of native corns together, selecting traits that led to a short season, drought-tolerant and cold-tolerant corn variety.
Typically, when heritage varieties of corn leave indigenous hands, the variety is re-named something generic, severing the ties between the seeds and their cultural stories and histories. All corn comes from native corn seeds, so this whitewashing represents the ongoing oppression of peoples who have tended these seeds since time immemorial.
Painted Mountain corn is an interesting attempt to break that cycle, because the breeding process was not trying to co-opt culturally-significant varieties, but to cross everything together to create something entirely new, while acknowledging the origins. As we confront histories of cultural destruction and seeds losing their homes, it’s important to acknowledge that living cultures are never static, but always mixing and blending, especially when times are challenging. We see these seeds as a metaphor for a path toward a more livable future: from complex and mixed origins, perhaps more resilient ways of life might emerge.
Every year we grow Painted Mountain, the corn produces something new that we’ve never seen before. This corn is not uniform or predictable, but always alive and changing. Purple cobs and husks with pink-blushed or deep red kernels. Cobs with a whole rainbow on a single ear. We love this corn!