Protip from my first year growing corn. Make sure you treat the tassels or ear worms will get in there and eat about 1/2 of every ear. There’s some pesticides you can use, hit we just used vegetable oil, and it seemed to work.
Childhood torture memory of Dad making us put drops of olive oil on every ear of corn in our vegetable garden that was big as half a football pitch. And these caterpillars with saddles on their backs stinging me.
Our house is pretty windy but it runs perpendicular to that fence behind the corn, so I’m really hoping that acts as enough of a wind break! If not then maybe next year I take over more of the front yard haha
Good, that fence should help a lot. If you see a storm or wind advisory in the forecast you may want to stake the corn to give the stalks some extra support.
At the end of the day it’s an experiment. No matter what happens you’ll have learned something valuable.
With that little bit of corn, you’re probably going to want to hand pollinate. They recommend at least 4 rows about 15 inches apart. Corn is wind pollinated, so it needs a sizable plot and open exposure to get good harvest without help.
Seconding this. First time I did corn, I was disappointed at how weird and shriveled every ear came out. Like, some of them had good, edible spots, bit the rest looked diseased and I thought for sure it was some kind of fungus or pest. Nope. Just didn’t get fully pollinated.
I’ve grown small quantities of corn in the past. In my experience, you’ll get two ears or corn perplant on most plants but some will only yield one. This could depend on the verity you’re growing
Everything everyone has said in this thread is accurate. This means that even if all plants yeild 2 ears each, not all those ears will be fully developed - especially if you’re only growing a few not very wide rows of corn.
Very cute! Unless I am seeing the scale wrong though, you’re going to have some very crowded plants. The problem with that is that you’ll probably have issues with rust and earwigs.
Oh hmm, the insert said 8-12" inches apart and with the 4x3 setup it should be 8" for the columns and 12" for the rows. I’ll have to see how these go and can always adjust for next year!
Haha, yeah, those inserts… In my backyard experience with corn I ended up needing about 2 feet between plants. They get big and can easily have a 10-12" radius of leaves. Maybe thats what they truly mean by 8-12"? It’s okay and you have the right idea to try it and adjust each year.
So I have 18 seedlings right now and was going to get another six, so I could have 12 in each mini-plot. Do you think it would be better to move the first plot around a bit and have two sets of 3x3?
Yep! They sell them at hardware stores in the US. You drive a spike of rebar through the hole at the top to keep the blocks aligned and stacked neatly.
Double Standard hybrid sweet corn! Supposed to be tasty and have a nice yellow and white mix of kernels. And I’m in the 9b zone it looks like now (just changed last year I believe)
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