Justin Neel

Some interesting ideas here, but I think the simplest solution is two evil words most everyone here loathes "Homeowners Association". If people can set them up to force lawns and keep chickens out, why couldn't they be set up to force organic compliance, off grid power consumption, composting toilets, no more than 150 sqft of lawn..... and so on.

tel jetson wrote:

John Elliott wrote:
It showed up on its own last year. I made sure to let a couple ears get all the way ripe, to the point that if you shook them, you got black spore dust everywhere. After last year and this year, I think my garden will be well colonized.

nice. I went to the effort of getting a permit to transport cultures (a controlled substance), but I haven't made the time to rig up a system for propagation. I've heard vague rumors of wild infections out here, but nothing I can confirm. I've certainly never seen any in the field, even in ten years of growing many acres of sweet corn.

I love the stuff, though, and I'm quite sure there would be a ready market in my town.

It grows wild all over the place here(east central Indiana), I ride my bike through the country quite a bit and regularly see ears of field corn infected, I haven't seen any this year but the cobs are still pretty young. I always avoid picking it for fear of pesticides\herbicides\gmo contamination, but now that you mention it I may grab the next ear I see, grind it up, and spread it on a separate corn patch next year. Which raises the question, will spores keep over winter and what would be the best way to store it?

I've been contemplating something similar and your plan looks almost like mine. i plan on starting with three sprouts per spot, with a smaller spacing than I intend to have finally, and making sure to evenly distribute the seed from each type of apple collected, i.e. seed from apple 1, seed from apple 2, apple 3, apple 4, apple 1, apple 2, and so on. At the end of the first growing season I'll thin to the healthiest plant per spot. I'll then wait at least till the second fall, if not the third, and decide which apple type produced the healthiest plants, remove all the others and then graft that winter.

Remember one of the main reasons to graft is so that you can get the healthiest roots while still getting the variety you want, not all seeds will be suitable for root stock and to me it seems like one year of growth isn't going to give you enough of a chance to see which are the most vital and disease free. But admittedly I'm just starting to learn about growing fruit trees so I could be totally wrong on any part of this.

When I first started to garden, about 15 years ago, every year my corn would get a terrible case of "smut", almost complete infestation of my crop, and I would tear it all down. After a few years of this I gave up trying to grow sweet corn at all and just planted more beans. About 3 years ago I learned that the fungus was edible and supposedly pretty tasty, so I decided to plant corn again, expecting to get a large harvest of fungus, so of course I now get plenty of sweet corn and haven't had a single cob turn to huitlacoche since.