Abby,

If I recall correctly Earth Tones is a fairly short corn. check it out and if so, keep that in mind when you plant. You probably don't want to put full fledged pole beans on it. The same is true with any pop corn I've known (short stalks). Sweet corn won't handle beans growing on it because along with the sweet genes come the genes for weak stalks. I'd recommend that you plant half runners 'round the sweet corn.
To save seed you will want to stagger your planting by at least 3-4 weeks, possibly more if the one you are protecting is planted real early on. Things grow much more slowly in the cool spring than latter on. Personally, I can't see how I can grow more than two kinds of corn, per year, for seed, unless I have isolation gardens. I don't have time to do hand pollination and bagging. So, if you want to save seed from any of these you will want to plant that one several weeks earlier or later than the others; and you would want at least 200 plants of that variety.

Even if you were not saving seed you would want to keep in mind that you don't want to mix your pop corn with any other kind, or it probably won't pop very well. Sweet corn shouldn't cross with dent,pop, flour or flint (your ornamentals), so you need to stagger the sweet corn so that it cannot possibly cross pollinate with any of the others. I assume that the sweet corn could cross between varieties and be okay, since they are all OP. But if you want to produce pure seed, then you need to treat them just like the other corns and give each adequate isolation from any other corn.

If I were in your shoes I think I'd freeze some of these seeds to plant another year. I'd plant one corn as early as possible (right before the last frost date), wait three to four weeks and plant another, then if time still permits, I'd plant one more 3 weeks after that. If it gets too late I'd just freeze that one too, for another year. Sit down with a calendar and your average first and last frost dates and plot things out.

One other possibility would be to think about a friend who might have a spot in which you could plant a variety of corn; one which has no other corn growing anywhere near by.

Hope this helps!

George
Tahlequah, OK

I have plenty of seed for each variety, so I may just plant everything together and not save seed. That way I could see which ones I wanted to plant next year. The corns I have are: Earth Tones, Painted Mountain, Rainbow popcorn, hybrid ornamental (already mentioned those 4), Truckers Favorite, Yukon Supreme, and Hawaiian #9. The beans I plan on planting are: Chinese Red Noodle, Turkey Craw, Logan Giant (purple), Mountain Climber, Jeminez, Tobacco Worm, an unnamed pole (green, pink stripes), Trionto Violetto, off-type Turkey Craw, and 5 seeds each of beans I found growing amongst my other last year. One has deep red seeds and the other white; I didn't plant any beans those colors last year so I guess they are crosses. I have chicken wire that I can grow some beans on, but the ones I only have 5-15 seeds of were the ones that would be grown up the corn. Would so few still overwhelm the stalks? I could pound some stakes in to help bare the weight if need be and there will likely be sunflowers harboring beans as well. I always have a few come up as volunteers.
How easily do beans cross? I've grown Turkey Craw with other beans for awhile and have never had any problems with crossing... unless the crosses came from trades.
And thanks for the info macmex!

Abby

The one fly in the ointment is the popcorn. It needs to be isolated from other types of corn or its "popping" qualities are severely diminished. The others are bascicly field corns, so the effect of cross pollination will be mostly in appearance.
I have never had problems with common beans (P. vulgaris) crossing, although I have seen testimonials from those who have. At any rate it is not a high probabilty.