Talk of corn

Recently, on one of my online vegetable growing discussion groups there was talk of corn and the Three Sisters (not the mountains in Oregon).
Three sisters is a traditional American Indian planting of corn, beans and squash together. The beans climb the corn and the squash wanders through the corn patch, insulating the soil and helping conserve water.
Last year I planted Hickory King dent corn (the tallest corn—reaching 15ft.), scarlet runner beans, and Australian butter squash. I enjoyed growing cornmeal corn, and the butter squash, which is a variety fairly new to the seed catalogues, was delicious, and stored well. The scarlet runner bean goes on my list of “veggies more people should be growing”.

I thought this exchange on the discussion group was interesting and worth sharing. I like hearing individual success stories/methods and this one, with a few of it’s responses, is informative.

Here it is:

Yes, you can use the SFG (Kazi’s note- this is the Square Foot gardening method — a popular and successful backyard gardening method that works well for people with unworkable soil) of closer planting in heavily amended soil (lots of compost). I generally plant my corn on 7" x 7" spacing in a patch, not rows. If you step carefully, you can get to the interior of the patch while the corn is young ... but it is dense enough to keep most weeds from sprouting ;-)

This does make it a problem for adding pole beans to the corn, tho ... so I plant bush beans around the outer edge of the corn patch, and plant watermelon or cantaloupe and let the vines run through the corn patch. There will be a significantly cooler environment under the corn stalks.

I also weave a soaker hose through the patch when it is knee high ... at that time, I hill the corn, side dress with compost, lay the soaker hose, and mulch with grass clippings. Until tasselling, this is generally the last 'hands on' care the corn needs.

At tasselling, I go out in the early morning when the wind is at it's lowest and brush through the patch to make sure the pollen falls into the corn, and not blown away on the wind.

The next time I do anything for the corn is to apply SevinDust to keep the corn borer caterpiller out of the ears when the kernels are starting to fill in. I only apply it once.

The last time I do anything to the corn, is HARVEST! Woohoo!

a response:

If Sevin dust gets on the tassels, it can kill bees that are gathering pollen.

You can also control earworm without affecting bees, by using a dropper to put a drop or two of mineral oil on the silk where it emerges from the husk, just as it is drying out after pollination. This will suffocate any earworms inside.

and another:

Hilling means mounding up the soil.
Because corn stands tall, it is quite vulnerable to going down in a wind, especially in soft loamy or sandy soils. Hilling the corn helps support it better. It also helps drainage in poorly draining soils.

and one more:

Pollination is easy with corn. When the tassles form, pollen will begin to shed. The silks should be light green and fresh looking. When they get dry and start turning brown, it's too late.

It can be as easy as walking the row knocking each stalk with your elbow, so it spreads pollen on adjacent plants. Or you can be more purposeful and bend the tassel over the silk of adjacent plants and shake it. If you have low sun (early morning) and the sun is behind your tassel, you can see the pollen in the air.

And early morning is the best time. If it gets hot and dry, pollen will die.

For small patches or windless seasons, I would always help out the corn as an insurance policy. Many of the big corn growers of the Midwest don't trust to luck either. They hire helicopters to fly up and down the rows, just above the corn.

thanks to those who share their knowledge.

Snarky bees

Here's the beekeeper Bruce tending the hives last night. I got stung twice- once on the ear. Not the way I had hoped it would turn out, but I always want to get close to watch him and I sometimes pay for it.

SWARM!

One of my beehives swarmed today.








When the hive gets overpopulated and raises a new queen it will divide and part of it will take off to a new home. The swarm was hanging in my tangerine tree. I called the beekeeper, but before he could get here to capture it, it went away. I wish I knew where it went. Unlike the horror movie image of a swarm, it is actually not dangerous. The bees carry a food supply with them and their bellies are so distended with honey that they could not arch their backs to sting you if they wanted.

Hybrid or Heirloom?

As home vegetable gardening has become so much more common in the past few years more and more people come to me for advice or ask to see my garden. A kindergarten class is coming in a few weeks, the local Junior College has asked me to get involved in their new permaculture garden, a film maker wants to film my garden to try and raise money for his upcoming documentary on urban farming, a young couple in their new home heard me on the radio and want to look at my 100+ fruit trees to help them decide what to choose for their new yard, and the occasional neighbor shows up at the door with questions about this or that.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is about hybrid and heirloom seeds. Actually it doesn't take a question to get me started. A simple comment might set me off. I admit that the controversy between these two types of seed is a pet peeve of mine, because they have become buzz words, bad and good, and there is a lot of misinformation. What is an heirloom seed? It has become a confusing term. It is a seed type that has been around for a long time, usually one that has not been maintained or developed by contemporary seed companies. Many of them have been collected from very small areas around the world where a neighborhood, or even a family have been saving their favorite vegetable variety seed for generations. These seeds are "open—pollinated," which means they will produce the same kind of vegetable in the next generation if the seed is saved properly. No one company owns these seeds, and heirloom vegetables have added an unbelievable richness of variety to our gardens and tables in recent years.

Hybrid, on the other hand, has become a bad word. Some people seem to believe that there is something to be avoided in hybrid seeds and advise others not to use them. This is ridiculous. All heirloom seeds ARE hybrids. Plant hybridizers back to early agrarian man and great great Aunt Mabel on the farm in Kentucky have all done exactly the same thing. They have grown successive generations of the same plant variety and chosen seeds or cross-pollinated for characteristics they want to emphasize. A tomato variety has to be around for many years for the breeder to stabilize the seed and produce true to type in following generations. The F1 (first generation) hybrid that may have been developed recently will not reproduce true to type. In many respects the terms heirloom and hybrid represent phases of a variety's development. Some of the tomatoes that Aunt Mabel had high hopes for did not improve and stabilize and were discarded. Some of todays new hybrids may stabilize in time. Also, the seed companies, seeking more ways to make money, have patented some of their varieties. One of my long time garden favorites and most prolific vegetables is Burpee's Butterbush—a compact Butternut squash that thrives in my garden. I can only get it from Burpee and this does not bother me. I hope that their plant hybridizers continue to come up with more varieties for us to try. Do you eat Pluots?? Or Nectarines? or Tangelos? These are hybrids, developed by the same type of scientist that is working on vegetable varieties for fun or profit. Do you like sugar snap peas? or stringless green beans? Every single food you eat is a hybrid, as are you yourself.

Agri-business has been working very hard to make money with patented hybrids and GMOs. We've heard the stories of GMO seeds that wander onto neighboring farms resulting in lawsuits and farmers who can't save seed from their corn because it is patented. This stuff scares me. But let's keep big agribusiness and backyard vegetable growing clearly separated in this particular area. It's agribusiness' job to hybridize for longer shelf life, crops that ripen all at once, travel well, can be picked early and stored long, loaded into big trucks and have seeds that the companies can maintain control over. That's where the money is. It's true that flavor is way down their list of priorities. But let's not assign the word hybrid to this set of goals. Radiator Charlie developed and controlled his now beloved heirloom Mortgage Lifter Tomato for a long time to make money— thus its name! Different hybridizers have totally different goals for totally different reasons. The folks at some of our home garden seed companies are working to create new varieties for you and me to use in our backyards, where a tomato that tastes like heaven and has a shelf life of about 20 minutes is not a big problem.

Are you going to save seed from your heirlooms or let your seed supplier do it for you? Do you have the space to isolate varieties from each other? Do you know that different varieties of tomatoes have to be different distances away from their neighbors to get seed true to type? These are important details in seed saving. Get William Woys Weaver's incredible book Heirloom Vegetable Gardening and you will be inspired to try many varieties and techniques in your garden. Or join the Seed Savers Exchange. I have chosen not to save seeds for now and continue to buy my open pollinated varieties fresh every few years.

Each year I plant some old favorites and some new varieties. I love trying heirloom varieties. But my success with them has been very inconsistent, even sometimes dismal, and my gardener friends say the same. I love the colors and rich flavors. But I would never plant a summer garden without my favorite modern tomato hybrids. I love Early Girl both for flavor and its unbelievable fecundity. Once a couple of summers ago I picked 50 pounds off 2 Early Girl plants within about 15 minutes. I canned whole tomatoes and made sauce and paste. I have never had this level of productivity with an heirloom tomato. Maybe you have. How does your microclimate and garden soil and water chemistry interact with all these varieties? You find this out by trying and trying again. And again. It's hard to read a catalogue like Tomato Grower's Supply, where the hundreds of varieties are described in such glowing terms (they are trying to make money too). How do you choose? My most successful heirlooms are replanted every year- like Black Prince, White Queen and Persimmon tomatoes. And I keep trying different heirlooms and modern hybrids to give me the most chances for variety and abundance. They both have their place in my yard and have served me well.