3 Sisters Garden, 2024, Year 2

After growing up with nothing but yellow corn (some variation in shade), I'm enjoying my relatively recent discovery of the variety of colours of corn kernels.

Our recent attempts have included Mandan Bride, Assinibioine Flint, Tom Thumb popcorn, and possibly Saskatchewan Rainbow Flint, from Heritage Harvest Seeds corn.

Our spring trip to Peru opened our eyes further as well with the development done in Inca times for different purposes including for varying microclimates.  

Derek Thille wrote:After growing up with nothing but yellow corn (some variation in shade), I'm enjoying my relatively recent discovery of the variety of colours of corn kernels.

Our recent attempts have included Mandan Bride, Assinibioine Flint, Tom Thumb popcorn, and possibly Saskatchewan Rainbow Flint, from Heritage Harvest Seeds corn.

Our spring trip to Peru opened our eyes further as well with the development done in Inca times for different purposes including for varying microclimates.  

Same here. Since I started growing this corn I became interested in the colors.

Have you gotten any decent harvests that far north? How long is the growing season?

Thom Bri wrote:

Same here. Since I started growing this corn I became interested in the colors.

Have you gotten any decent harvests that far north? How long is the growing season?

We haven't yet, but we really only started larger-scale gardening again in 2022.  That year critters took out most of the seedlings before they got very far.  Where we are growing was under chemical ag through the 2021 season, so we are also working on rehabilitating the soil.

If I recall correctly, we have an average of about 115 frost-free days.  Since corn prefers some heat, I do look for shorter season varieties.  Our acreage is near the edge of industrial ag corn production.  There's always a lot of sweet corn grown in the region.  

In about 10 days the city of Morden is hosting its annual Corn and Apple Festival.  Morden is about another 40 miles SW of our acreage...when you get there, you see a fair amount of corn, beans (not all soy but navy and pinto as well for sure), and sunflower grown, as well as potatoes.

The pic my wife picked to put on our Christmas cards!

Pic taken in the morning, after I returned home from a 13 hour and 45 minute night shift at the hospital ICU (stepdown, if that means anything to you), during which I killed a man and brought him back to life in an attempt to reboot his irregular heart beat. It worked! Eeriest thing I have ever done. Watching his EKG flatline and NOT restart for about 10 seconds, thought for sure we were going to have to shock him and start compressions, but then there was a beat, pause, and other beat, pause, etc., and then a nice, steady, normal heart beat.

My other patients that night were crazy too; toughest night I have had this year. Get home and wife wants to take a pic...

That's my home brew sweetcorn. Been picking about 20 ears a day this week (mostly smaller) and eating ALL of them. Best year for sweetcorn I have had, and the best corn.

Damages. Pitched a dozen ears of moldy corn today.
Top pic is mold.
Bottom pic shows the difference between bird damage and rodent damage.

Today's crop, 118 ears kept. I am pitching maybe 10% of the ears for smut, excess bird damage, and mold. Last pic is a few of the better ears, longest about 11 inches. Range is 2 to 11 inches, average 6-8.

Also yesterday's yield: beans, zucchini, tomatoes, and the first cantaloupe!

Fun pics:

Always glad to see these updates!  

I've had quite a few disappointments this year as I tried to expand my growing space to trial more seed.  I lost a lot of time & high-value (to me) landrace/grex bean seed from various sources due to weather, rodents, birds, & insect pests.  I was successful in expanding the breadth of genetics in my 3rd year watermelon and C. Moschata (pumpkin phenotype) grexes, so they are both coming along very nicely considering the hardships they've survived.  

Now, I'm adjusting plans for next year and ready to get planting!

Keep the updates coming!

I have been picking sweet corns recently too. As for the small ears I decided to use them as baby corns instead of spending more time on those.
It's been exactly one month since I planted morando corns and they are all tasseling and some silking. Tropical corns are photoperiod sensitive so that may explain the early maturity.

Cy Cobb wrote:Always glad to see these updates!  

I've had quite a few disappointments this year as I tried to expand my growing space to trial more seed.  I lost a lot of time & high-value (to me) landrace/grex bean seed from various sources due to weather, rodents, birds, & insect pests.  I was successful in expanding the breadth of genetics in my 3rd year watermelon and C. Moschata (pumpkin phenotype) grexes, so they are both coming along very nicely considering the hardships they've survived.  

Now, I'm adjusting plans for next year and ready to get planting!

Keep the updates coming

I remember you mentioned some setbacks earlier this year. Hopefully next year is better. I have a new climbing bean that appeared this year, quite different from prior years, very aggressive growth. I imagine it's the result of crossing two of the other beans I have been growing. It's all fun. Some years are great, others not so much, but it's all fun.

May Lotito wrote:I have been picking sweet corns recently too. As for the small ears I decided to use them as baby corns instead of spending more time on those.
It's been exactly one month since I planted morando corns and they are all tasseling and some silking. Tropical corns are photoperiod sensitive so that may explain the early maturity.

Yum!
Morando, or Morado?
I tried some corn from Guatemala once, from a friend's field there. In Illinois it grew and grew, taller and taller, and never tasseled. I figured day-length problems.
My late sweet corn is tasseling, some of it. The last planted is still small.

Yes, it's "morado", typo. There's also one called Montana morado, I guess the day-length sensitivity is breed out for growing in temperate zone.
Here in Fig 8, an Indonesian corn is grown in US and failed to produce an ear.
https://www.pioneer.com/us/agronomy/corn-brace-roots.html

No pic today. Maybe tomorrow. Been spending a lot of time picking and husking corn. If my count is correct, 493 ears picked in the last 3 days. That's most of the downed corn and a fair bit of the standing.

Not quite as impressive as it sounds, lots of those are tiny nubbins, 2-4 inches long. It's funny how the weather affects things. Last year was super dry and hot. This year cooler, and nearly ideal rainfall. So last year's stalks were amazingly thick, never seen stalks that thick at the base. Also, there were more suckers, and lots more large secondary ears; many were nearly as big as the main ear. This year the stalks were thin, fewer suckers, and fewer secondary ears. But lots of very long main ears. The secondary ears are mostly nubbins. Interesting how malleable the plants are in response to different seasonal weather.

I am really impressed with the glass gem corn. It does not make large, impressive ears, but each plant often has several ears. The plants themselves are quite robust, many of them withstood the windstorm that blew down half my corn plants. Even better, I am finding very very little damage of any kind to those ears. No bugs, no mold, even the birds didn't seem to be interested at all. Definitely going to keep planting quite a bit of it mixed in with my other corn. If anyone is starting out planting corn, I strongly suggest adding in at least some glass gem if what you want is a hard flint style corn.

Glass gem mixes:

Counted 690 ears harvested so far, which includes about 100 nubbins, so 15% or so tiny ears. Pic of some of the nubbins. Don't want to give the impression it's all wonderful ears!

Some possible seed ears all about 10 inches:

The leftover corn stalks can be used for crafting too. The high color contrast of yellow and dark colored stalks is great for teaching kids about different weaves and make little crafts out of them. Here is a triaxial weave or mad weave coaster just for fun.

May Lotito wrote:The leftover corn stalks can be used for crafting too. The high color contrast of yellow and dark colored stalks is great for teaching kids about different weaves and make little crafts out of them. Here is a triaxial weave or mad weave coaster just for fun.

Very pretty. Wish I were 'crafty' like that.

Every now and again I need to remind myself that every year is different.  The timing and amount of rain and heat and frost has a significant impact on what does well in a given year.  That's part of the reason we strive to plant a variety of things in the garden each year to try to ensure we have some sort of a harvest.  

Our corn is progressing.  Hopefully I get enough time this fall to be able to prepare some spots for three sisters attempts for next year.

Now for our crops, it's a battle against the first fall frost for the more tender plants...that's usually about mid-September in this part of the world.

Storing corn in the basement with a dehumidifier. Seems to be working well so far. Bundled in bunches of 5 or more with string, hanging from nails.

Ground cover after corn harvest. Not as much as I had hoped; beans, squash and cantaloupe were slow to take off and did not get the total coverage I had expected. Tomatoes doing quite well though.

I stripped the leaves off sweet corn stalks when they were done to give the beans more sunlight.  Remaining stalks make great green bean trellis.

May Lotito wrote:I stripped the leaves off sweet corn stalks when they were done to give the beans more sunlight.  Remaining stalks make great green bean trellis.

I have been walking the stalks down so the vines can just grow over them. If something is already climbing up then that stalk gets left standing. With the declining sunlight I want as much getting to the late stuff as possible. Also, it's really hot and dry right now, so a loose ground cover is good.

Since harvest is well underway, thinking about next year and what to do, same or different.

No caps on the plastic bottles. It got too humid. I took them all off.

Start off with the corn hills much lower and flatter. Too high from the early spring, so was not able to scrape enough dirt on top to support the stalks and make proper hills during the growing season. I think that is partly why I had so much lodging. Will level the hills off with a few scrapes with the heavy hoe shortly before planting.

Plant beans, cantaloupes, and squash much later. This year tried an experiment with very early planting. It was a bust. Bugs were terrible, the plants were weak and spindly. They need more heat, longer days and shorter, warmer nights. So back to my normal method. Plant beans when the corn is up, and squash when the beans are up. I can also plant the corn much later. This year was abnormally early, at the end of April. Didn't seem to hurt the corn, except that germination was poorer than I expected.

Go for fewer stalks per hill. 4 is plenty, three is good. More than that leads to too many spindly barren stalks.

Soak the corn and bean seed before planting. Have done this in the past. I know it works. Just didn't get around to it this year.

Add more glass gem seeds. Not just pretty. It makes great crosses, very vigorous, very low insect and bug damage, and even the birds didn't seem to go for it. I have some ears that look like pure glass gem, and others that appear to be crosses. Add both freely.

Thom Bri wrote:So back to my normal method. Plant beans when the corn is up, and squash when the beans are up. I can also plant the corn much later. This year was abnormally early, at the end of April. Didn't seem to hurt the corn, except that germination was poorer than I expected.

You may have noted it earlier in the thread, but are you able to direct sow your squash where you are?  Here, the season is short enough that we generally need to start with plant starts / seedlings.  I'm concerned if I followed your method with starts that the squash might overwhelm the young beans.  Of course, transplants do seem to take a bit of time to really get going so it may not be that bad, especially if I plant them a bit farther out.  Thanks.

Derek Thille wrote:
You may have noted it earlier in the thread, but are you able to direct sow your squash where you are?  Here, the season is short enough that we generally need to start with plant starts / seedlings.  I'm concerned if I followed your method with starts that the squash might overwhelm the young beans.  Of course, transplants do seem to take a bit of time to really get going so it may not be that bad, especially if I plant them a bit farther out.  Thanks.

I direct plant most everything. If I can't, I don't grow it, with a few exceptions, peppers, tobacco, parsley.

I don't worry much about one plant overwhelming another. I plant enough beans and squash that I generally get all I want, but this year squash is rather poor. Beans get planted closer to the corn and squash at the midpoints between the corn hills, so there isn't a problem until late in the season when the squash seems to be trying to take over everything.

A bigger 'problem' is tomatoes, which may crowd out other things, so they get chopped back pretty severely at times. Squash will pull down corn or sunflowers, so I will pull the vines down if it's early in the season. Beans, squash and tomatoes are all planted mixed together. Sometimes one wins, sometimes another.

Kind of disappointed the other day when I went to grind some corn for flour. Found weevils. I emptied out my bin and put as much as would fit in the freezer. Tossed out the rest in a remote corner for the local animals to enjoy. Lost about 16 pounds of corn from last year's harvest. Once weevils get started they are hard to get rid of.

Picked the last of the corn today. Always kind of sad when the corn season ends. Now comes the hard part, shelling the ears, since I don't own a shelling machine, do it with my fingers. I suppose I could fold it up with a sheet and drive over the ears a few times...

The garden as it looks today with no standing corn. Right now is the main tomato season, more than we can eat. Also zucchini, cantaloupe and beans picked most days. No zucchini today, but we have so much that we ate it for dinner anyway. Got a kabocha squash today, first one and too early; vine borers killed the plant.

I've seen people shelling corns with two ears rubbing against each other, not with your fingers. The commercial corns in the background seem to have a long way to go. How much bigger can they get with a longer season? The closest corn field near me is over 10 miles away and the corns are totally dry by now.

Maybe this has been asked before, but has anyone ever tried replacing corn with sunflowers?  I think I'd like to have 2 3-sisters gardens , one with corn and the other sunflowers.  My squashes have impressed me with how much elbow room they need.

May Lotito wrote:I've seen people shelling corns with two ears rubbing against each other, not with your fingers. The commercial corns in the background seem to have a long way to go. How much bigger can they get with a longer season? The closest corn field near me is over 10 miles away and the corns are totally dry by now.

Shelling by rubbing two ears is too messy, kernels flying everywhere. I shell as I read on line, so my floor would be covered in seeds.

Though it looks green, the corn is almost ready to harvest. It could be harvested now, but would require a lot of money spent on drying. The ear shucks are already mostly dry. My corn and that field were planted within a day or two of each other. Most years I plant later, and we harvest about the same time.

I really like the way the guy farms my dad's land. My dad is 94, so may not be with us for a long time. I spoke with my siblings recently about what we will do with the farm in the future. Looks like we will keep it going, and I suggested keeping the current renter managing the farm. He is very careful of the soil. Yes, more or less standard chemical farming, but he plants cover crops every year to add organic matter and protect the soil. Seriously, he manages our rented land more carefully than a lot of farmers do their own land!

Jeff Marchand wrote:Maybe this has been asked before, but has anyone ever tried replacing corn with sunflowers?  I think I'd like to have 2 3-sisters gardens , one with corn and the other sunflowers.  My squashes have impressed me with how much elbow room they need.

I have a lot of sunflowers come up as volunteers in my corn. I mostly let them grow as they please, though I don't harvest the seeds. Just like seeing them. They are very good for the beans and squash to climb on, though squash will eventually pull them down.

Only drawback is that they are very heavy shade. More than the occasional sunflower will pretty much shade out everything else. So if you are going to do polycropping, consider fairly wide spacing of the sunflowers. I have not tried the short varieties, that might work better?  If they are shading something too much, I often pull off the lower leaves.

A pic of the common yellow dent hybrid, ear picked 45 feet (15 meters, roughly) from the edge of my corn garden. It was 3 rows inside the field. Shows how corn pollen moves. There were a handful of different-colored kernels on that ear. My corn picks up a similar amount of hybrid pollen, I am sure, or more since that field is much larger than my garden. Next to it is an ear that shows what the following generations look like after the crosses.

The second pic shows that ear surrounded by a bunch of average ears from my garden, some obvious crosses and others not obvious, though all of my corn probably has a good bit of hybrid genetics in its background after 20 years of crossing. I have only attempted to select away from the crosses in the last 2 years.

Christopher Weeks wrote:This will be my fifth year growing three sisters -- I started with mounds and after the second year switched to a big patch and this year I'm moving in the direction of the milpa..

Hi Christopher, been meaning to ask you, how do you distinguish between 'milpa' and 3-sisters? Is there some difference?

I was in Guatemala for a few years working with the farmers. They used the word milpa simply to mean cornfield. Sometimes it had beans or squash, often not.

Some pics from today. My selected corn seed for next year. Longest ears are ten inches after drying down. Mixed in are those that appear to have some glass gem genetics-very hard seeds and different colors. I will choose one ear I consider exemplary of my goals and grade the rest down from that, laying them out in a row. The 'best' half dozen will supply 50% or more of the seed, with the remainder supplying the rest. Will include a handful of the pure glass gem and a larger amount of the glass gem crosses.

Goals include: Flint type seeds, purple or white cobs (no red cobs because that indicates hybrid crosses) zero or very low damage from birds or bugs, purple foliage, long, well-pollinated ears.

It's a judgement call which ears are hybrid crosses, most of them I have to assume, and the first generation crosses are usually the fattest and often the best ears. So really I am selecting for those that 'look like' what I want, but the reality is they are all mixed. My first generation crosses were some really huge ears, both fat and long, and a lot of hybrid vigor I imagine. At some point I may purchase some seeds to add more mix to the mix.

35 lbs of grain drying on a bedsheet. Just getting started!

I suspect corn-thieving evil in his heart.

Very cool!

Can you tell us what the growth characteristics are for the glass gem?  

Does it produce multiple ears?  

Is the stalk thin like popcorn?  

Do you plant more seed in the same space as your bigger corn, or do you just mix it in & treat it the same?  TIA

Cy Cobb wrote:Very cool!

Can you tell us what the growth characteristics are for the glass gem?  

Does it produce multiple ears?  

Is the stalk thin like popcorn?  

Do you plant more seed in the same space as your bigger corn, or do you just mix it in & treat it the same?  TIA

Update, it was 45 lbs per actual scale weight. (About 20 kilos.)

The glass gem is a tall, robust stalk, strong and wind-resistant. It was my tallest corn, guessing 8-9 feet but I didn't measure it except with my arm. Pure green, no pink, red, purple color in stalk, leaves or silks. White cobs. Typically 3 ears, sometimes more or less. All ears are similar, there is not one dominant ear that is larger, and all ears appear to pollinate well. It's somewhat later than my other corn to tassel and dry down, but close enough to cross quite a bit without adjusting planting times. It tillers quite a lot and some of the tillers produced ears very similar to the main stalk's ears in size.

It is a popping corn, but not as good as a real pop corn bred for that. The stalks are not thin. I plant it exactly the same as my other corn and it responds well. I have not tried to calculate whether the 3 small ears equals one big ear, but it seems less. I think my hills were too densely planted this year and it might do better with just 3 stalks per hill.

I accidentally left a small pile of ears lying on the ground for several days. Mice ignored the glass gem ears and went for the other corn. Too hard? If it was left longer they would eventually have taken all of it.

It is great the farmer is taking good care of your family farm land. Hopefully he is rewarded with excellent yield too.

The late planted corns are growing fine, although the ears are only inches off the ground on some shorter stalks. The color is gorgeous.

I only have less than 400 sq ft of regular garden area since I can't get enough organic matters to keep more area properly mulched year round. This solarize-and-plant method works very well so far, I will have more space to grow corns next year. After all, it is like nine months of cover cropping and three months of gardening.