Corn

Friday 30 December 2011

Corn is one of those crops we grow just to impress the hell out of people. It requires a ton of room, a ton of fertilizer, and a ton of good luck. Some years we've gotten some good crops. Some years we've gotten mediocre crops. The primary determinate is the temperature. If we have a hot June and July, the corn comes on strong. If we have a rainy July, we might as well mulch it then and there.

One of the primary problems is finding specific varieties. The best variety we've ever had was called Polar Vee, and we've found it very difficult to find it recently. One year we ordererd Polar Vee from a supplier, and they substituted Seneca instead, which wasn't nearly as productive.

Summer 2011

No corn this year. We'll try again this next summer now that the high tunnel is up and working.

Summer 2010

We tried the Earlivee seeds from Burgess Seed Company. The crop grew moderately well, but the July rains kept the ears from growing very big. By the time moose season came around, we had a few 5-gallon buckets with small ears. Those ears were sweet, but not like the corn of yore - such as the bumper crops several years ago. We're going to let the ground go fallow in the corn house this year, rebuild the roof, and then plant it again in corn in 2012.

Previous seasons

Here are some of the tricks we've used over the years:

• Growing pumpkins and squash among the corn. The pumpkins were a real bomb. The vines were unruly, they didn't get enough light under the corn stalks, and I didn't yet know that I had to hand pollinate the pumpkins. Another year I grew rondini among the corn, and the vines looped all over the corn without producing any fruit. I've also grown zucchini in the corners of the corn house, which was a little more successful, with the two plants producing some nice-sized zucchini. More room would have meant more productive zucchinis, though.

• Pollinating the corn. The corn pollen apparently falls out of the flowers from the wind into the crooks of the leaves, producing the ears. In our first corn house, the roof was removable, so the wind just did its thing, and we had great production. It was also one of the warmest years on record in Galena. When we moved to the new house, we tried to create a corn house with a removable roof, but the pollination was far less successful. For several years I went into the corn house and manually shook the plants, showering the plants and myself with the pollen (and causing my eyes to swell up as if I had just rubbed poison ivy into them). In 2010, I set up a fan to act like the wind in the greenhouse, which actually worked pretty well.

• Fertilization. In the spirit of the Thanksgiving story, I've buried fish out there in the soil along with the more typical store-bought fertilizers. This worked well to attract every dog in a one-mile radius digging up the garden, even in the dead of winter, when I would have thought the soil would be too frozen to dig out or produce smells. This year I buried a bunch of fish and locked it up tight to prevent feeding the dogs.