Zea mays.

A multicoloured corn with translucent kernels for cornmeal, drying or popping!

Its story is one of the most beautiful in the world of seeds. Glass Gem came out of the patient work of Carl Barnes, an Oklahoma farmer of partly Cherokee descent, who spent decades recovering and re-selecting old Indigenous corn varieties, isolating year after year the ears whose kernels showed the brightest colours. He passed his collection to Greg Schoen, who carried on the selection, and it was a photograph of one of those ears, shared in 2012, that made the variety known worldwide almost overnight.

This is not a sweet corn, and you shouldn't grow it thinking of a corn roast: it's a flint type, left to dry completely on the plant. Every ear is unique, with round hard kernels, translucent like glass beads, in combinations of blue, green, pink, mauve, amber and red that can be neither predicted nor reproduced. At maturity the ear looks more like a jewel than a vegetable, and that's exactly what made its reputation.

Three uses, all real: as decoration, whole dried ears keep their colours for years; as popcorn, the kernels burst into small white crisp flakes (the colour is in the kernel's hull, not in the starch, so the popcorn comes out white — that's normal); and ground into flour, it gives a meal with blue highlights for polenta, tortillas or cornbread.

Grower's tip: corn is wind-pollinated, so it must be sown in a square block and never in a single long row: aim for at least 16 plants (4 × 4), or the ears come out half-filled. Two points specific to Glass Gem. First, it crosses very readily with any other corn within a few hundred metres, and a cross with a sweet corn gives disappointing ears on both sides: isolate it in space, or stagger the sowing dates so the flowerings don't overlap. Second, you have to be patient: 120 days to the ear, then a complete dry-down on the plant, and several more weeks under cover before shelling. Harvest when the husks are brown and dry and the kernel no longer marks under a fingernail.

• Open-pollinated.
• Grows to ~2.4-3 m (8-10').
• Strong, high-yielding plant.
• Produces ears up to ~12-20 cm (5-8") in 120 days.
• Flint corn, not a sweet corn: leave it to dry completely on the plant.
• Wind-pollinated: sow in a square block of at least 4 × 4 plants, and isolate from other corn.
• Exposure: full sun. Rich, deep, well-drained soil. Space 25 to 30 cm in the row, 75 to 90 cm between rows.
• Direct-sow late May to early June in Québec, once the soil is at least 15 °C.