270 days and, to make it worse, that has to be 270 days of EARLY SPRING weather, like what you'd get in mid April to early May. The heat of summer stunts and kills it just the same as the cold of winter. As far as I know there are VERY few other spots where you can pull that off (the area around Fort Portal in Uganda where Joe got all those beans may be one, since it is also more or less on the equator but really high up, but I don't know of many more.
Actually growing the vast majority of Andean crops is hard outside the Andes, since they're ALL used to that. It's one big reason why my attempt to grow ahipa (the Andean relative of jicama) never got anywhere; the plants sprouted and flowered all right, but, with no insects that wanted to pollinate them, I got no seeds back, and with no extra long season, it never had time to start work on any tubers (though, so far, this beats the Bambarra Groundnuts, which I can't seem to get to even germinate.)
I DO use glass for the loose kernels, small jars or what are called "tissue vials" (the little screw top glass vials they use for samples in medical labs. The Container Store used to sell them [They seem to have stopped, but I have bought so many over the years that, if I am willing to take the time to paw through the giant bin in my room, I can pretty much always find a matching top and bottom],) depending on how much. But a jar big enough to hold three ears of corn, (even three mini ones) with their husks still on the ends would be a pretty big jar, very easy to knock over and break if I'm careless.
I'd also have to first confirm the ears are still truly pest free. Back when I first got most of the odd mini corn I'm growing now, the ears I bought were falling apart and INFESTED with both grain weevils and granary/pantry moths (which probably indicates it was super old when I got it, as granary moths infest stored grains, not ones in the field, and take a while to get established. I did remove the damaged kernels and put the rest away in a jar, but I ended up having to open that jar and go back through it more or less every day for a MONTH because it did not occur to me that some of the grains had moth eggs INSIDE them that would hatch, let the larva feed pupate, eat it's way out, and promptly infect the OTHER kernels in the jar. The same jar that was meant to keep the bugs out ended up keeping the bugs IN! Lost a really interesting full sized kernel I was planning to plant that way (only time I ever saw a truly grey colored corn kernel). And similar incidents have happened from time to time since; the weevils in the Bambarra groundnuts I got from Kenya (I knew they were insect damaged when I got them, but didn't know there were still insects ALIVE in there (as well as, I think, insects eating the insects, as some sort of small fly kept sometimes showing up and since I know of no fly that eats grains, I have to assume it was a parasite of the weevil larvae.) and then proceeded to hide out in corners of my room and chew holes in any groudnuts I dropped and forgot to pick up for a while).
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