Saving seeds

[Roland]

How do u save youre mais seeds? And how long can u store them?

For example, is it posible to freeze the seeds at -18°C, and how long can u store them?

[Tim DH]

Hi Roland,
   I've never done anything special to save my maize seed. Just in the garage, it keeps three years with very little loss of viability.

Tim DH

[William Schlegel]

Maize or corn in the USA is OK to freeze in a sealed container if dried down properly first. Carol Deppe's plant breeding book gives instructions.

It keeps five plus years for me stored unsealed in a cool dry place so I don't bother. However I live in semi-arid Western Montana USA and our humidity is low.

[Jeremy Weiss]

For me, it seems to depend on the corn. Most of my samples are well over 15-20+ years old, and I NEVER froze them (or even refrigerated them), so by all rights, they should all be dead or nearly so. And yet, every time I select anything and actually plant it out, I not only get germination, I still get near 100% germination. Maybe there just really really durable corn types.

The last corn I had TOTALLY fail I think was my Evia, and I had had that seed since high school, I think.

My only real issue with keeping corn is making sure grain insects don't get in/ any ones that were there when I started have been totally gotten out (when I fist got a lot of my corn samples, they were riddled with miller moths. Or why I kept no complete ears for reference.)   

[Klaus Brugger]

Here's some information on storage behavior of maize seeds (caryopses) in the Kew Seed Information database: https://data.kew.org/sid/SidServlet?ID=24559&Num=502

Ultra-dry (<5% water content) maize seeds (dried with silica gel and kept in air-tight containers with little air) should keep for many many years even at room temperature. Frozen, they should theoretically keep several decades. Maybe for maize the optimal water content is just a bit above 5% [1][2], but at home you usually don't have the possibility to work and measure that precisely anyway.

I think that sweet corn seeds might generally have a lower life expectancy than other types, but I don't have data to confirm that.   


[1] Yan, M. (2013). The optimal moisture content for ultra-dry storage of maize seeds. Journal of the Chinese Cereals and Oils Association, 28(10), 71-73.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289319265_The_optimal_moisture_content_for_ultra-dry_storage_of_maize_seeds
[2] Yan, M. (2017). The preliminary study on the optimum moisture content of ultra-dry storage and its related chemicals in seeds from six crop species. Plant Genetic Resources, 15(6), 506-514.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479262116000216

[Roland]

Thank you.