Garden

[gardenman]

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.

[CLHS68]

If you are anything like me that will be good. I could live on corn & fresh tomatoes all summer. If you get more corn than you can use you can freeze some. It tastes so much better in winter than anything you can buy in a store.

[cindyNC]

@gardenman I ordered seeds from Park this year as well as a company called Reimer Seeds.  I moved from NYS to NC about 20 years ago.  

Live w/my BF since I retired and the soil around his yard is hard packed clay.  Friends in FL recommeded getting Earthgarden planters so they are sitting on the patio in their boxes until planting time. 

I made sure my seeds were more of the hot weather resistant variety.  I have bush beans, eggplants, squash, sweetie pie bell peppers,  and small "bush" tomato plants.

The most interesting bush tomatoe is called Bush Goliath Tomato (Reimer).  Per the description it  "can be brought inside over winter so you can enjoy tomatoes all year long."  

What do you start your seeds in? I used some coco coir rather than seed started. 

[gardenman]

@cindyNC 

I mostly use the Jiffy seed starting mix. It tends to give me better results. Last year I tried using mostly the Jiffy 7's, but they failed in weird ways, so back to the Jiffy seed starting mix this year.

There are some really neat little tomatoes you can grow. Way back, over thirty years ago, I grew one of the first of the dwarf tomatoes (Patio maybe?) as a Christmas gift for my grandfather. He loved homegrown tomatoes and had a big south facing window with a radiator under it. It was a perfect spot for a tomato plant. I started the seeds in September and pretty much surrounded the plant with fluorescent lights. By Christmas the plant was almost two feet tall and loaded with nearly ripe tomatoes. I wrapped it up in a big plastic trashbag to transport it to his house and it was arguably the best gift I ever gave him. All winter, and well into the spring he was still getting fresh tomatoes from the plant. Anyone who got within range got dragged in to see his tomato plant. I think the rest of the family wanted to kill me as all he wanted to talk about was his tomato plant. 

[cindyNC]

What a wonderful memory!

[candys mine]

@gardenmanYour post made me smile today!

[gardenman]

Well, my corn seeds made it from South Carolina to NJ in about three days. They left SC on the 10th and arrived in NJ on the 13th. Today's the 16th and they aren't supposed to be delivered today, so maybe tomorrow? Who knew UPS Mail Innovations was an innovation to actually slow down the postal service? They're even getting farther away rather than nearer. They were in a town about 15 minutes away on the 13th and are now (the 16th) in a town about an hour away. Things are trending in the wrong direction.

Ah well, whatever will be will be. I don't need them for a while yet anyway, but it would be nice if they got here. Or at least started moving closer instead of farther away.

[mousiegirl]

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@gardenman wrote:

@cindyNC 

I mostly use the Jiffy seed starting mix. It tends to give me better results. Last year I tried using mostly the Jiffy 7's, but they failed in weird ways, so back to the Jiffy seed starting mix this year.

There are some really neat little tomatoes you can grow. Way back, over thirty years ago, I grew one of the first of the dwarf tomatoes (Patio maybe?) as a Christmas gift for my grandfather. He loved homegrown tomatoes and had a big south facing window with a radiator under it. It was a perfect spot for a tomato plant. I started the seeds in September and pretty much surrounded the plant with fluorescent lights. By Christmas the plant was almost two feet tall and loaded with nearly ripe tomatoes. I wrapped it up in a big plastic trashbag to transport it to his house and it was arguably the best gift I ever gave him. All winter, and well into the spring he was still getting fresh tomatoes from the plant. Anyone who got within range got dragged in to see his tomato plant. I think the rest of the family wanted to kill me as all he wanted to talk about was his tomato plant. 

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@gardenman   Wonderful story.

[gardenman]

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.

[gardenman]

The corn seeds came! Yea! The tracking still shows them in Bellmawr, but they came! Now I have to figure out when to start them. They like a soil temp of 65 degrees, but that's more for germinating than growing.  They'll grow cooler than that. I'll probably start the seeds very soon indoors and grow them indoors or in my cold frame until they're three to six inches tall (maybe more depending on the weather) then transplant them outside. Corn gets three to six inches tall pretty quickly. I've got some larger six-packs I'll start them in and grow them in until planting out. Those six-packs have about three-inch wide cells that are also about three inches deep so the plants won't be cramped for space. 

They take 79 days to maturity (give or take a bit) so if they hit the garden around May first as plants I could have corn around the Fourth of July if I start them today and everything goes right.

My seed starting this year went very well with one odd exception. I've gotten 90+% germination and success with almost everything except the marigolds. None of them came up. Arguably the easiest seeds I started this year and they've done nothing. Thirty seeds went into the flats and none germinated. I'm pretty sure that's not my fault but a bad batch of seeds. Luckily I've got some more marigold seeds in reserve I'll dig out. They won't be ready when I want them, but they'll come along a bit later.