Quite Possibly the Prettiest Thing I've Ever Harvested

Back in April I posted Two Varieties of Corn For the Garden about the varieties of corn I would be planting.  You can read it if you click on the link above.  In that post I took a picture of the seed packet containing the Glass Gem Corn.  To be honest, it looked photo-shopped.  I thought to myself, "There's no way corn actually is that beautiful!"

Two months and three weeks later here is what the glass gem corn looks like.  It is between 10-12 feet tall and towers over everything else in the garden.  Amazingly, it stands erect and hasn't fallen over in winds and rains like other heirloom corn varieties I've tried tends to do.

Normally, you can tell when corn is ready to harvest when the silk on the outside of the ear turns dark brown.  I picked one ear of glass gem corn the other day that had dark brown silk, but when I took the husk off, all the kernels were white.  Since I had already broken it off, I went ahead and ate it raw, standing right out there in the corn patch. It was tasty.  But it was not ready.  I decided to let the corn continue to mature until the husks where no longer green, but were light yellow in color.

Here's what I found when I pulled the husk back today!

Wow!!!  Let's look a little closer...

And we'll zoom in a little more...

Well, I can see why they call it "Glass Gem" corn, can you?  There are numerous shades of beautifully colored kernels.  It is like looking at fairy tale corn.

I'm still waiting for the rest of it to mature more before harvesting.  You can see the corn in the middle was harvested before it was ready.  The kernels are pink and white and yellow.  Evidently, it hasn't matured yet.

I couldn't wait to go inside and show the family our first little harvest of Glass Gem Corn. 

I am going to try to save some seed so that I can plant more of this next year.  Glass Gem Corn.  Certainly pretty to look at, but it tasted pretty good, too!