As usual, I’m putting too much time on the road and not enough time in the garden. Flower and garden shows and other trade shows on weekends throughout the spring and early summer have kept me from where I’d rather be.
I planted a bed of sweet corn on June 7th. That’s a lot later than recommended, but I’ve been much later than that before and still had a fine harvest. I normally plant two beds of different varieties, but this year I was only able to get one bed of Bodacious seeded.
I was home this weekend and the corn needed to be thinned. I plant corn in 10″ wide rows across the beds, seeded 2″ on center. I later thin these to 6″ apart. In past years I’ve used the transplants to plug thin spots where I’ve had bad germination, but this year as I had fairly good germination and only one bed planted, I had the opportunity to experiment with building a complete bed from the transplanted thinnings.
The bed on the left is what I transplanted. The bed on the right is the original seeded bed. I got most of it transplanted yesterday. We had a good soaking rain last night, so the transplants had an easy time of it. I finished the job today, working in mud. I didn’t have enough thinnings to completely fill the second bed, but I’ve got a block of corn 18 rows deep by 6 plants wide, so if this works, I’ll have 108 stalks that I otherwise would not have had.
Yesterday, when the soil was a little drier, I was using a hori-hori knife to cut out the corn for transplanting. It is very important that one does minimal disturbance to the root system when transplanting corn. If you take off too much of the root the corn will grow stunted and/or not set fruit. The garden knife worked great, yesterday, but today the bed was far too muddy. Today I used the CobraHead, which worked very well in extracting the whole root with a mud ball attached. It was also easier to pull back a hole in the mud of the new bed to drop into the transplant with the CobraHead than it would have been with the knife, proving to myself once again that there is a tool for every job and one tool cannot possibly do it all.
Around the outer perimeter of corn I’ll plant cucumber seeds. When they start to vine, I’ll trail them through the outer rows of corn. I’ve done this with great success in years past.
I’ve laid out T-posts with which I’ll build a corral to keep the stalks from blowing over when the summer thunderstorms try to knock the corn down. A disadvantage to raised beds is that the corn in the soft soil is easily flattened by high winds. I started fencing in my crop years ago and have found that by doing this, winds are mostly not an issue. You can see what I do here.