Growing CornYou Do Have Room For It
Growing corn in your garden lets you taste one of the sweetest, freshest flavors of summer. Many home gardeners are scared of planting corn, fearing that they do not have enough space to grow it successfully. That couldn’t be further from the truth! As your friendly garden gnome, I’m here to debunk the myths about growing sweet corn in your yard, and show you how to grow corn. How To Grow CornCorn is a wind pollinated vegetable crop, one of the few grown in the home garden. Bees, birds and butterflies pollinate most vegetable and fruit plants. Corn is actually a domesticated grass, and as such has developed as a wind pollinated plant. Wind pollinated plants produce prolific amounts of pollen, but must be planted close together in order to pollinate itself correctly.While you can grow tomato plants interspersed with your flowers in the garden, and still get juicy, ripe tomatoes, you have to grow several corn plants very close together so that they can cross-pollinate each other with nothing but the wind to help. A minimum size plot for growing corn is four feet by four feet square. Hybrids and Open Pollinated VarietiesSome types of plants cross easily with each other. Members of the squash family do this. Some beans cross with each other, as well. “Crossing” means that pollen from one plant is transferred to another plant, and the resulting seeds are a hybrid, or a combination of the genetics from both plants.Hybridizing is one way that new varieties of plants have been developed over hundreds of years. The problem with hybrid plants is that you can generally only grow the first generation. Seeds from plants grown out of the first generation of seeds are not necessarily the same as the parent plants. Open pollinated varieties of plants are plants that can be planted from seed, raised to maturity without crossing with another variety. The seeds from the mature plants are saved and planted the following year, producing the same type of plant reliably over and over again. For people wishing to grow their own food, save the seeds and perpetuate their own sustainable gardens, open-pollinated varieties are the best types. If you grow corn, because it will cross-pollinate and produce hybrids easily, you need to grow your open pollinated varieties far from each other, or time your plantings so that they do not flower at the same time. You’ll Find Both Open Pollinated And Hybrid Seed At:Gurney's Seed and NurseryPlanting the SeedCorn seed is large and usually vigorous. Plant it 1 to 1 ½ inches deep, one seed every couple of inches apart in rows, later thinning the plants to 8 to 12 inches apart. Plant the rows 12 inches apart in raised beds or hills, or 2 to 3 feet apart if you will walk between them.Corn FertilizerCorn is grass and a heavy feeder. It has high nitrogen needs just like your lawn. Before growing corn, lime the soil to a pH of at least 6.0 to 6.5 - even 7. Use a good rich compost to start, and side dressing of fish fertilizer every month until harvest. You chemical gardeners can use a granular lawn fertilizer with an analysis that looks something like 24-8-8, or a similar ratio.Harvesting Corn
Now that you know how to grow corn, here comes the best part. To eat corn while fresh, the ears should be harvested when the silks have just barely begun to turn brown, and pressing a thumbnail into a corn kernel releases milky juice. To save corn for seed, let the corn ripen and dry on the stalks until the stalks turn brown. Sometimes, you need to protect your corn from raccoons and other mammals. You can protect the seed ears with netting or screen until they are ready for harvest. That's all there is to growing corn. Raising and harvesting your own sweet corn is the perfect way to celebrate summer. Make sure the water’s boiling before you go pick! (And save some for the gnomes!) Happy gardening, Geefrank
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