Calling it corny

The “official” spring is not here, but after another 90F+ day yesterday, I’m calling winter over. Mother Nature may kick me in the butt for doing so, but it’s time to once again tilt at my personal windmill: I’ll be planting the first round of corn at the ranch this week. We’ve been here since the middle of 2007, and didn’t really plant anything that year. Since then, here are the results for the corn:

2008: planted, but the native soil was too weak, since most of this area used to be pine forest. Poor germination, poor growth.

2009: incorporated manure and topsoil into a plot of the native soil. Better germination, still poor growth that stalled at about the one foot tall mark.

2010: no crops, thanks to another round of cancer to beat back.

2011: good germination, steady growth. Trampled by deer, as it was in an unfenced area.

2012: moved the sowing to raised beds. Zapped by multiple tropical  storms as it was beginning to tassel.

2013: sown again in raised beds. Good germination, good growth, tasseled out, fair pollination, some pushover from storms that caused a good number to lodge. Winter squash and beans sown with the corn (the “three sisters” method). Corn earworms got into a lot of the ears, and total harvest was half a dozen ears. No harvest of the beans or squash, as neither produced.

2014: sown again in raised beds. Good germination, growth, okay pollination. Winter squash sown underneath. Got sick during a visit from relatives, couldn’t keep a close eye on it, as the illness hung on and on for over a month. The corn survived most of the storms, but no harvest.

2015: will sow again in raised beds, but without any complementary planting. I intend to use some stakes and string to create a matrix for the corn to grow through, to try to keep it upright during our summer storms. Since corn is wind pollinated, and here, the wind is often fierce enough to blow the pollen away out of the plot, the plan is to help the pollination by hand. We don’t have a thousand acres of the stuff to capture all the pollen being blown around, which would just leave the perimeter planting as an issue if we did have that much  in the ground.  That means monitoring for the tassels being fully open and anthers to start forming. Once this happens, and I can see the pollen, I’ll start cutting the tassels and brushing them over the silks of the ears that will begin forming at about the same time the tassels are ready. Hopefully, this will be just the thing to get over the Sisyphean hill that has been corn planting at the ranch.

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