Thom Bri

I have thinned the hills down to 3 or 4 plants per hill. I have found that more plants than that and I end up with lots of barren stalks or stalks that grow poorly.

The conventional field-no till, with herbicides etc., contrasted with my corn in hills. Both actually look good right now. I had to replant a bunch of hills but most of them have good sprouts growing now.

Big storms, knocked a plum tree in the back yard right down! Another inch and 3/10ths yesterday, probably the same again or more today. More rain in 3 days than in all of May. Just over 1 inch in May. So everything is starting to look nice again, grass is returning to green, gardens look good.

No, but apparently this was a thing back in colonial era America. I have read reports from early growers who used beds to start corn in northern areas with short seasons.

I have also read that farmers would soak a bucket of grain and dump it out near the field edge to give the crows something else to eat.

What I do is plant about 5 seeds for every one I want to grow. Then thin them if too many grow.

Another inch and 3/10 rain. Garden looks good. Corn is getting tall enough to permit hilling. Spent a few minutes today thinning excess corn plants. Hoping to see lots of squash and cantaloupe sprouts this week.

j glenn wrote:

I've got 2 questions.

The first, which is why I checked in at the forum, is whether it is possible to get Daikon radishes started  under the corn early enough to get 60 days before a hard freeze?

I was planning on letting the corn dry on the plants into the fall, but will need to plant the Diakons in early September.

Any thoughts?

Second question is about Tobacco, which I saw mentioned as an "incidental"

I was looking into growing some this year but came across references saying keep it away from your vegetable garden.

"Buffalobird-Woman" was not a fan of tabbaco in the garden, and theres lots of references about  planting tomatoes and tobacco together being a bad idea.  We have a bunch of tomatoes in the garden, so that nixed the idea for me.

Any thoughts?

Re daikon. I think you might be Okay with corn if you use wide spacing between the corn rows. Corn planted densely blocks most of the sunlight.

Re tobacco. Buffalo Bird Woman planted the lady's garden. Men planted tobacco. Problem with tobacco is it is a huge plant. One tobacco plant takes up the space of one hill of corn and completely shades the ground for 4-5 feet  out from the base of the plant.

Potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and petunias are all fairly closely related. I suppose it is possible there might be bugs or diseases in common. I have never noticed a problem. Lots of tobacco, tomatoes and potatoes right on top of each other year after year.

Joao Winckler wrote:That 22 days vs 9 days comparison is a good lesson. Cold soil just stalls everything and you end up with weaker plants than if you'd waited. I've found the same with corn, planting into actually warm soil makes a bigger difference than getting a head start on the calendar.

Some luck involved. Plant early and you get a warm spell and it looks like genius. This year it was a lot of wasted seeds!

Good day in the garden! We got some rain overnight. I dreamed of a thunderstorm and woke up and it was true! One gauge said  6/10" and another said 1 inch. We need a lot more but everything looked so great today. Weather report gives at least chances of rain for the next 5 days.

Sweet corn is really starting to grow. The rows look ragged because I replanted everything and some of both plantings is growing. Very irregular. I also planted a few new rows this week, 2 rows today, mixed varieties. Still hoping for a long sweet corn season.

Planted a few watermelons today. In spots where squash failed to sprout.

No advice. For years I grew good watermelons, until I didn't. Have not been able to grow them for maybe 5 years now. No idea why not.
Bought seeds and trying again this year.

The local hybrid corn. That stuff is tough! It was planted about the same time I planted my corn, and shows no visible signs of drought. Nice and perky even at noon. This is the field immediately east of my garden. We trade pollen Though I do attempt to remove the obvious crosses, without a doubt there is a large amount of hybrid genetics in my corn.
The farmer is pretty good by my standards. He plants cover crops, rotates crops yearly, and limits insecticide use (not eliminates, but limits).

May Lotito wrote:My corns are growing quickly and the space is filling up. They are quite uneven, some are 2 ft tall and a few are half the size. I planted a second batch of corns in a different spot and some squash seeds somewhere else. My soil isn't fertile enough to support all three sisters, or even two continuously. In one spot I grew squashes for two years and corn with bean in a third year (amended with compost every time), it was still so exhausted that stilt grasses took over afterwards. Thom you have amazing soil and great stewardship in your garden.

And I envy you your seasons! With no rain since planting (a few tenths) I am happy to even see sprouts right now. Tallest is maybe 4 inches and lots is just one.

Do you have a fixed fallow schedule?

My hope is that by covering the garden with a variety of species I can avoid most nutrient loss issues. I have harvested and taken away permanently 400 pounds of corn in the last two years. According to the University of Illinois,  that works out to about 36 pounds of phosphorous lost per acre, for example.

https://extension.illinois.edu/crops/soil-phosphorus

I have no idea how much rock weathering replaces yearly or what the base rock contains. Parts of the garden were in use since 2006 and I added about half that much area again since about 2020. Prior to 3 years ago I often added NPK fertilizer but wasn't removing large amounts of produce. It's a mixed bag as far as reserves. And it gets mulched every year so that added some.

There are huge arguments among historians and archaeologists about how long lands worked the way I am trying to replicate could be farmed. The old view is that Indians rotated fields every few years and had rapid declines in productivity. Other scholars claim this method preserves soil fertility and fields were used up to 50 years continuously. No one knows or agrees about how North American Indians treated their soils, if they used fallows or mulches or fertilizers. It's a big argument in the literature, and the competing scholars get pretty surprisingly nasty about it in dueling papers.

I lean towards the view that Indian ladies were as smart as modern people, as observant, and had hundreds to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and practice to lean on. So I figure they found ways to keep fields fertile.

I use mulch, ash and charcoal, soil carried in and dumped on the poorest hills.

I also allow many weeds and volunteer 'crops' to fill in the inter-row spaces. Hopefully drawing up deep soil nutrients. Dandelions, clovers, dock, brassicas, sunflowers, tobacco, oats and rye, beans and squash and melons etc. I lose some immediate corn production through water and nutrient competition, but hope it averages out in the long run with better soil quality.