Thom Bri

Sweet corn finally catching up. A few of the very early variety are tasseling, even though only about 2 feet tall. That's fine. That variety makes lots of tiny, very good little ears.
As you can see, it is well-guarded.

The garden as a whole. You can see the weaker area to the left.

This one is funny. It's the 'Mountain Morado' corn from Baker Creek. I planted half a row of this stuff, on 5/9/26. That's 50 days. It's making ears and pollinating already! Tallest is about 3-4 feet tall, about 1 meter. Also, almost every plant looks nutrient deficient, striped or yellow leaves. Very interested to see if it produces much in the way of ears. Not blaming the seller; I knew going in that it was an exotic that might not be well-adapted to my zone. As Mary mentioned above, it might work well if you wanted a very short-season crop.

With my usual corn I will start seeing the tips of the first tassels at about 55 days.

Some 'mulch' ready to harvest. Love mallow. It grows everywhere, very vigorously, with a deep tap-root. If I am careful I can get the whole plant plus root. Leave the root and a week later it looks fine growing like crazy. This whole patch is between tworows of hills. Today it all got harvested to cover the hills. Temps are supposed to be high this week, 90sF (30+ c) so I want the hills well mulched in advance. Fortunately rain has been great this month, 8 inches in June, so the crops should tolerate it just fine.

At the back is a potato plant flowering. Potatoes look pretty good this year too. I plant them between the corn hills, so the soil is poor, all the good stuff scraped off to make the corn hills, then packed hard by walking on it. But the potatoes seem to do well anyway. I generally plant whole potatoes rather than cutting chunks unless it is huge. Cut potatoes get more diseases so I have read. I bought one bag of seed potatoes and also got a deal on some green, sprouting potatoes at the local Aldi. The manager agreed she couldn't sell them green so she offered me half price.

Pic of the poorest hill and a good hill. Some hills had to be replanted if germination failed or something ate the baby plants, so the poor hills are mostly just delayed. On the other hand one area of the garden always has lots of poor hills. The soil is thin over limestone gravel that was laid down when this was a cow lot. When I used fertilizers this area also produced well, but without fertilizers it's poorer. I am gradually building up the corn hills with more dirt so eventually it should get better.

Pics from the last few days in the gardens. First, some buggy talks. Boring insects lay eggs and their worms eat right down the stalk, ruining the most important area, that makes the ears and tassels. This appears to be usually on the main stalk and rarely seen on the suckers. What I do is cut the stalk below the damage and squash the worm. Hopefully the secondary stalks will fill in and produce some ears. If a hill already has 3 or 4 healthy stalks growing I simply pull the whole stalk out roots and all. Pretty frequently see worm damage on stalks that have already been browsed on by deer, but often enough see it on otherwise intact plants.

Coydon Wallham wrote:I feel like the Spring growing excitement robbed us of a final summary of this experiment?

On thing I noticed going around and harvesting downed branches for the RMH is that unless you have a yard that is constantly being cleaned up, you have no idea how long the sticks have been on the ground. I've taken to snapping them rather than cutting them to get a feel for if they are dry and crispy, but not sure if I am separating out the 'green' sticks from old punky ones (for proper hugel disposal) properly, as the green ones seem to break rather than bend if thin enough. If dried out thoroughly, will an older 'punky' stick burn well without pulling away more BTUs than it contributes?

Dry punky wood burns great. But not much heat value to it. I use it to help start fires.

I generally just use LOTS of seeds, since I expect lots to fail to germinate and bugs to eat most of the sprouts. We just save the seeds from the supermarket peppers all winter and in the early spring I scatter handfuls of them on a big container. They stay in the garage until they sprout then go outside.

This has worked pretty well the last few years since I started doing it this way. No tender care, no heating mats or special lights. Just an excess of seeds. Water, sunlight.

Works Okay for planting directly in the garden too. Since we save lots of seeds and are constantly buying more peppers, I just scratch a shallow furrow in the garden dirt and scatter however many seeds I have and lightly cover them. A few grow. Fresh seeds work as well as dried seeds, maybe better.

Only 'drawback' is we have no idea what variety of pepper they will be, just whatever we bought and whatever survived. Right now I have a dozen plants in small pots and a few more growing from seed directly in the garden.

More flowers. Some kind of cone flower. Seeds were saved last fall and scattered widely around the garden. Hopefully won't compete with the corn too much.

May Lotito wrote:...All right of my Montana morado corns are silking. I guess since the variety was bred for fast maturing in a shorter season, they respond too well to heat and humidity.

So far the Inca giant corns are looking similar to bloody butchers. I am wondering how tall they will end up being...

Wow! It's early. So I was out on the garden yesterday and fortunately had my camera handy. See what my Mountain Morado is doing. It's barely a foot tall and ALREADY TASSELING! The whole row. Clearly not latitude adapted to my zone. I wonder if it will produce anything at all. Unless it really comes along I doubt it will be worth adding into my other crop since that would require staggered planting times.

The Maize Morado on the other hand is the same height but not tasseling at all yet. The two varieties are supposed to be descended from the same source so I wonder what the difference is.