OPEN-POLLINATED SEEDS:

Open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seeds generally give you plants identical to the parent plant from which the seed is collected, unless cross-pollination has occured. If cross-pollination has occurred, you may not get an identical plant from saved seed. The only way to get seed you are sure of is to grow an open-pollinated plant in isolation by distance from a plant that could cross with it, or to isolate it "by time", meaning that any plant you grow that could cross with it is planted later so they are not in bloom at the same time, or to put some sort of barrier, like a bag, over the flower before it opens so cross pollination by wind or insect is not possible. Some people plant their plants in isolation by some distance but don't have enough room for the "correct" distance, to they plant tall barrier plants like corn or sunflowers in between blocks of plants they hope to isolate, and the barrier plants help prevent cross-pollination.

HYBRID F-1 SEEDS: Hybrid plants have multiple (yes, there can be much more than two parents) parents and are the result of deliberate, and often highly complicated, crossing of the parents, and sometimes backcrossing again to get the desired characteristics. I know that Carolyn has often mentioned a hybrid tomato can easily have 8 parents, for example. So, if you save seed from a hybrid, the plant you get from the resulting seed could be very close to the original hybrid, though not identical, or it could revert and be similar to one of the parents, or it could have crazy, mixed up genetics and give you something different from each of the parents and from the original plant you saved seed from. Some seeds saved from hybrids may be sterile and you won't know until you try to plant them. Even if you save seed from a hybrid and get an "almost identical" plant in the second generation, known as the F-2 generation, you're still likely to see subtle changes in each succeeding generation, so the F-3 is less like the F-1 and the F-4 is even less like the F-1 and so on and so on.

If you try to save seed and dehybridize a hybrid, you might succeed, but most likely you will not. It has been done.

One hybrid tomato that has been successfully dehybridized by serious tomato growers is Ramapo F-1 Hybrid. I think some people have taken it out to F-5 or even farther and have been happy with what they have. To do so, though, you have to rogue out any plants from saved seed that give you plant or fruit characteristics that are different from your original plant and fruit or veggie and you have to plant a substantial number of plants from each generation of saved seed in order to rogue out the bad ones and keep the good ones.

GROWING MAIZE OR CORN AND SAVING SEED:

I don't know how to answer your question about Masa style maize, but I will try, and if I am wrong, I hope George or Jay or Randy or somebody else who understands plant genetics will correct me.

I do not believe you can grow your maize as planned and save the seed. All corn varieties are outcrossing plants that are wind-pollinated and they will readily cross-pollinate one another.

As your corn grows, the pollen is produced by the tassel that forms at the top of each plant. Think of the tassel as the corn plant's male "part". I think you know which part I mean. When the tassels ripen, tiny structures known as anthers emerge along the tassel and begin to shed pollen.

Meanwhile, down lower on the plant, the immature ears emerge from the stalk and then silks emerge from those ears. Those are the "female" part of the plant. Wind movement blows the pollen from the tassels and helps deposit it on the silks. Each silk that pollinates gives you one kernel on an ear. If enough silks are pollinated, you get good ears full of kernels. One reason you plant corn in blocks, rather than in one long single row, is to ensure each silk is pollinated.

Corn pollen is extremely lightweight and can be carried long distances by wind. Technically, to keep one type of corn from cross-pollinating another, you need to grow your one type of corn two miles from anything that could cross with it. In the real world, though, many of us grow different types of corn within a few yards of other types. You can do that if your two types pollinate at different times (tricky to manage, but it can be done), if you have a large thick barrier between the two types, or if you bag the tassels and hand-pollinate.

Saving corn seed can be very hard because a large number of plants must be planted every year to give you a large pool of plants to save seed from, and I think the minimum number recommended is 200 plants. This is important because corn is especially prone to inbreeding depression. As I understand it, inbreeding depression means that if seed is saved from too few plants for even one generation, then you immediately lose genetic diversity that is important to maintain that variety of corn. You might not think it matters if you lose a little genetic diversity, but what it means to a gardener or farmer is that the corn stalks become shorter, the corn ripens more slowly and the plants yield fewer and fewer numbers of ears. Generally the eating quality of the corn suffers too. Clearly, just a couple of years of inbreeding depression gives you a much different corn than the one you started with.

So, if you were to plant your three types of maize together, there is no telling what you'll get, but likely you'll get mixed ears that may or may not be edible. Succeeding crops will be the same way, but even stranger because the pollen and silks will "meet" and form ears in a hodge-podge fashion. Your saved seed won't be a hybrid, but it will be cross-pollinated. And, you didn't even say if your original maize seed is open-pollinated or hybrid, and that further complicates it. If it is hybrid, saving it will give you "who knows what" even if you only plant and save seed from one type.

If your maize is open-pollinated, and if you plant only one type, and if there is no corn within two miles that is pollinating at the exact same time OR if you have a barrier that keeps wind-blown pollen from elsewhere reaching your maize, and if you plant at least 200 corn plants in a block and get good pollination, then you have a chance (but not a guarantee) of getting saved seed that does not exhibit inbreeding depression.

I hope that what I wrote is understandable. I am not well-versed in plant genetics and never feel like I do a good job of explaining them.

If you are serious about saving seed, then you have to read Suzanne Ashworth's epic work on seed-saving. It is called SEED TO SEED: SEED SAVING AND GROWING TECHNIQUES FOR VEGETABLE GARDENERS. The second edition was published in 2002 and I wouldn't try to save any seed without reading her entire book first, and then going back and re-reading the section on the type of vegetable or grain from which I wanted to save seed.

Dawn