Glass Gem corn was created by Carl Barnes years ago. No one’s sure of when exactly he started, but it was in 2012 that a photo of the corn became an internet sensation. It’s real corn that’s grown from seeds that you can actually buy. There’s even a facebook page with over 5,500 ‘likes’ where people post pictures of the various colorful corns they grow.
The corn came around when Barnes started growing older corn varieties as a way to get closer to his Native American roots. He was able to isolate ancestral types that had been lost to Native American tribes when they were relocated to what is now Oklahoma in the 1800s.
This led to an exchange of ancient corn seed with people he had met and made friends with all over the country. At the same time, Barnes began selecting, saving, and replanting seeds from particularly colorful cobs. Over time this resulted in the variety of colors, all of which he would give unique names.
If you were to order seeds and grow the corn yourself, you wouldn’t know what color(s) you were getting until it was grown. You can, however, increase the likelihood of getting a certain color or combination of colors by taking seeds from a plant already grown with that kind of coloring.
