Garden

[cindyNC]

Glad you got your corn seeds! We were at a Publix grocery store yesterday and they had bush tomato plants outside the store - fully grown with green tomatoes on them.  About $15 a plant. 

[gardenman]

The quarantine has done wonders for the gardening industry. Plants and seeds are selling out in record time. One of the catalogs I deal with sent out an email advising that a new catalog was about to arrive and apologizing that almost everything in it was already sold out. 

The corn seeds were the last seeds I needed this year and I'd been planning to buy them locally, but that was looking iffy, at best, so I ordred them while they were still in stock. 

It's kind of funny the stuff that's selling like mad. Craft and hobby supplies are moving quickly, gardening supplies are going fast, and so are videogames. We have some industries doing amazing business while others are in freefall.

[gardenman]

And my first twelve corn plants are now in the ground and growing. They're about 8"-12" tall and doing great. The weather did not cooperate this spring so they spent longer in the cold frame than I'd have preferred, but it's finally improved and they're now out in the garden and looking good. I'll start another twelve seeds up tomorrow or next week to have ready for the second harvest, then every couple of weeks I'll start some more. I should be able to keep myself in fresh corn on the cob most of the summer. The first harvest should take place a bit after the Fourth of July.

Our last frost date around here is May 14th and it's like someone flipped a switch on the 14th and we're now in late spring/early summer mode. Last week I had ice in my birdbaths and fountain, and now every night is in the fifties and sixties for the foreseeable future. It's been a weird year in terms of weather. (Not that there's ever a "normal" year in terms of weather.)

I'm just glad to finally get plants outside. I've still got my dahlias to plant out and then I'll be ready to start my perennial seeds for planting out later in the summer.

[mousiegirl]

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@gardenman wrote:

My grandfather was a very hard person to buy gifts for as he had everything he wanted. He was still using an old 1950's era black and white TV into the 1980's. The "standard" gift for him was a new dress shirt. I never gave him the standard gift. After he died and we were cleaning out his house we found dozens of dress shirts still in their wrappers in the dressers in his spare bedrooms.

He loved baked goods (as do I) and gardening, so I would typically give him something I'd grown, baked, or made. The tomato plant was a big hit. So was a marquetry image of praying hands I'd made for him out of different wooden veneers. He kept that with him even when he had to move into a nursing home. It's hanging on my wall behind me now. 

He was a neat guy. He used to grow football mums in his younger days and would spend days/weeks disbudding them to produce the large football mums. We used to compete to see who would get the first tomato, then who would get the most.  He's been gone 30 years now, but he still lives in my memory.

I was lucky to grow up surrounded by gardeners. Both grandfathers were avid gardeners as were a couple of uncles. My neighbor to the south was also an avid gardener, though she never bought a plant. If she saw a plant she liked someplace, out would come a small pair of shears she kept in her purse and a few clippings would end up in her purse. Her yard was filled with plants named after where she got the cuttings. She had a Wanamaker bush, taken from a cutting of a shrub at the old Wilmington Wanamakers. She had plants named after the people's yards she stolen a cutting from. I had a Tropicana rose she admired and I notice a cutting had been taken from it. She rooted it under a large glass jar under her Wanamaker bush and then transplanted it when it grew roots. To her it was her Donnie Rose not Tropicana.

It was a perfect upbringing for me. It helped make me into the person I am today. My mom used to say she never saw me happier than when I was in my garden. She's right. It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I'm happier in a garden than anyplace else.

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@gardenman   So am I, gardening is my passion and feeds my soul.  Wonderful story about your neighbor, I have been known to break off a leaf from a geranium here and there, but first look for them on the ground of the garden center.  She certainly had a green thumb to have so much success from cuttings.

Loved your Grandfather story also.  Both of my parents grew up on farms, so imagine their Mothers grew gardens, certainly food.

My Mother gardened, in a small garden.  I remember the sweetpeas growing all over and up the tall back fence.  The weather was cool, which they like.  I grow them from seeds, but it is hit or miss, as they didn't come up this year, only some here and there in flower pots where they found their way.  

I remember the house being filled with Cecile Brunner rosebuds, and now grow them.  I was always in the garden and took DD at a very young age with me.  One day, I glanced over in her direction and saw that she had a green square plastic pot on each foot, as shoes, LOL.  I am hoping that when she has a house, she will garden.

I envy the corn you will be eating, have grown it and it is delicious fresh off the stalks.

[GoneButNotForgotten]

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@gardenman wrote:

I was planning to grow some sweet corn this year in my old strawberry bed and had been planning to pick up the seeds at my local Walmart, but I've heard that veggie seeds have largely sold out in stores, so I ended up ordering them through Park Seed.

I'm going with Honey Select, the 2001 AAS (All-America Selections) winner for edible vegetables. It's nice yellow corn with a 79-day maturity.  Mid-May is officially the last frost date around here, but I'll start some indoors in late April then transplant it outside in early May and cover with plastic if frost threatens. Once corn sprouts it's pretty frost resistant anyway, it just likes warmer soil to sprout. Starting it inside solves the problem of it rotting while waiting for warmer soil. I'll plant several cycles of it over the season so I can have corn most of the summer. 

Honey Select has several really nice properties. It lasts pretty long on the stalk, so you don't have the boom and bust cycle you get with some corn. You can harvest what you need each day and the rest will stay good for a week or longer. It doesn't need to be isolated so it doesn't matter what your neighbors are growing. It should be a good corn choice for me.

The old strawberry bed is about six by sixteen feet so I'll likely plant it a foot apart in a series of four-foot by three-foot grids with twelve plants in each grid. Plant each grid a week apart and God willing in 79 days (give or take a bit) I'll have a harvest. I should get one or two ears on each stalk so that'll be a dozen ears or so of corn every week for about eight weeks. Twelve plants per grid and eight grids mean I'll need 96+ seeds and my seed order is for 200 seeds, so I should be good to go. The total cost of the seeds, including shipping and tax, is under $8, so that's not bad. If things work out right, I'll end up with at least eight dozen ears of corn so it'll be less than a dollar a dozen. If I save the leftover seeds for next year and get similar performance the cost per dozen ears will drop to less than $.50 per dozen. 

It looks like a lot of people are getting back into veggie growing this year. It's the safest way to get a steady supply of food given the state of things.

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I hope you have good luck, and can you post pictures once in a while so we can see how they're doing?

[gardenman]

Here's a picture of the first twelve in the ground. As you can see they're about 8"-12" high now and should mature at about 72"-78". You may notice there's more than one plant growing close together. That's because I started two seeds in each cell to be sure I ended up with twelve plants. Once they've been in the ground a week or so and are doing well, I'll snip off the smaller of the two. 

I started up the next twelve this morning and they should be germinating in the next week to ten days and be ready for the garden in two to three weeks. From the first twelve plants, I should get twelve to twenty-four ears of corn. This variety is pretty neat in that it stays viable on the stalk for up to a week. That means I won't have to harvest it all and eat it all in a day or two.

There's a YouTube family I follow called White House on the Hill and they just planted their garden. They planted all of their corn at once. The problem with that strategy is all of their corn will mature at once. And they planted a lot of corn. I like succession planting with a new crop being planted every couple of weeks. 

My variety takes about 75 days to mature. It's had a good head start now and I'm probably, maybe, fifty-ish days from the first harvest. That would put my first harvest a bit after the Fourth of July. If things work out right I should then have a gap of maybe a week or two before the second crop comes around and then every week or two for the rest of summer I should have a new crop of corn. By starting just twelve plants at a time and starting new plants every couple of weeks I can stretch the corn harvest out over most of the summer. It's easier to plant it all at once, but I'll be planting about 96 corn plants over the course of the season and if I planted them all at once I'd end up with 96-192 ears of corn to deal with that all mature in about a week's time. It's much easier to handle 12-24 ears of corn every two weeks than a boatload in just one week.

By planting in a 4X3 grid there's a better chance of good cross-pollination than by planting it in a single long row. Having it up against the south wall of the house also improves the odds of good cross-pollination as the wind hits the house and swirls keeping the pollen moving and hopefully hitting every receptive pistil. Also, the south side of the house gets full sun and the extra heat is good for the corn.

It's right near my rain barrels on the back of the house which makes watering very easy. There's typically sixty gallons of water just sitting there waiting for me. It's not the best soil in the world, but it's decent. I'll be tossing in a bit of fertilizer as the season goes on to give the corn a boost as needed. It should work out pretty well. We'll see what happens. It's probably been twenty years since I last grew corn, but it's one of my favorite veggies and with me giving up on the old strawberry bed, it opens up the space for corn.

Catbirds are my strawberry nemesis. They're very clever little birds who just destroy my strawberry crops despite bird netting and other measures. They'll find a way under or through the bird netting and then take one big peck out of each and every strawberry. If you can't beat them, grow something else. There will be disappointed catbirds this year, but too bad. 

[luvmyteddy4]

I planted corn, tomatoes and cucumbers about 4 weeks ago, a little early for me but everything is coming up. I did seeds and also bought 8 tomato plants that are getting big. No blooms yet but tall. 

My corn isn't as high as yours but its coming up. 

I had bunnies starting to eat tomato plants so I fenced in the whole garden about 10x10.

I still have the top to do. Last year the squirrels ate all the tomatoes so I am determined to get some this year. 

If this doesn't go well I will probably not do another garden, its a lot of work. I want corn so bad.

[gardenman]

The second crop of corn is now just about ready to go out. It's about six inches high now in the six-packs and growing well. By starting twelve new plants every couple of weeks I should be able to keep myself in corn all summer. I've got to go out and prepare the soil for it as we've got rain coming for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I'll get the next twelve planted today or tomorrow and then this weekend I'll start twelve more plants for the next planting. Starting new plants every couple of weeks should keep me from having too much corn at once but have some corn over the whole summer. 

[hayseed00]

@gardenman  wonderful story about your Grandfather, enjoyed it very much.

[dex]

@gardenman @Keep us updated on the corn if you don't mind.I love reading your posts.