I plant flint corn in square-ish plots of about 5-8m on a side using several hundred seeds at about 30 cm spacing. I use a no-till method with lots of mulch, which has evolved to go something like this:
1) Let whatever is growing in the spring (either a cover crop or some sort of pasture) get long and rank, then chop and drop just before planting time.
2) Sow the corn into the green manure layer.
3) Cover with
wood chip.
4) Net against the sparrows, who will snip off every single green shoot as soon as it emerges.
The green manure part helps get a nice shot of nitrogen into the soil just when the corn plants need it most. One thing that I had some problems with this season was the looseness of the wood chip and the plants falling over before they got their aerial roots established. I just went out on mornings after high winds and righted the casualties, and heaped mulch around them for support. A little more labour than I wanted, but they're all good now.
For sweet corn, I plant one 2x1 m bed at a time, spaced out at 2- or 3-week intervals. Because this is in the main garden, the soil is already improved and gets a pass with the broadfork plus a topdressing of compost and biochar. Seed is planted quite close together, with a spacing of 15-20 cm for 60-70 seeds per bed. I put on a layer of chopped green mulch and top it with wood chip.
Right now there's a lot of tasseling going on and the sparrows are making themselves unwelcome by devouring pollen "grains" and this gives us somewhat uneven kernel formation in some ears. I guess I could put nets over the whole shebang, but that's more work and it's not dire enough to motivate me. What's funny is that sparrows aren't really numerous here. Just effective.
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