If you follow my blog, you will learn that growing corn is one of my favorite things to grow. Nothing compares to home grown corn, the taste is so much better than you can buy in the store. I have a tab in my blog navigation dedicated to just corn. I love corn!
Despite my love for growing it, corn does come with its own share of problems. Particularly for me it seems to always get blown over in strong wind and rainstorms. Last year I posted on how to fix blown over corn.
This year I decided to do some research on how to prevent blown over corn. I figured why not be a little proactive and maybe prevent the problem from happening. I searched the web and I found a few suggestions, and the most common was to form a mound around each corn plant. You form the mound when the plant is young and it forms more brace roots and doesn't blow over as easy.
This week I decided to give this method a try and see what kind of luck I have with it. Below are the steps I used to create my mounds and I hope that it works. It only took me about 30 minutes to "mound up" 125 feet of corn. I will post an update at harvest time to let everyone know how it worked.
I have five rows of corn that are each 25 feet long. I used my garden hoe to make furrows in between each row of corn. This was to break up some dirt so it was easy to gather and form the mounds.
Close up view of my plants before forming the mounds,
most are about 4 to 8 inches tall.
most are about 4 to 8 inches tall.
The next step was to get on the old hands and knees and work my way down each row gathering up soil and forming mounds around each plant.
Here are the final results with everything done. When I took this picture, two things popped in my head on the benefits of doing this besides helping the corn from getting blown over. The first thing is I have nice little furrows between each row when I want to side dress my corn with nitrogen fertilzer. The second was that I can use the furrows to run my drip hoses in between each row if I want.
5 comments:
looks great! i'll be growing corn for my first time this summer. i'm trying the three sisters method in a raised bed. we'll see how it goes!=)
Thanks Kelli, I have never tried that method but I have heard that it works really well. Let me know what success you have with it.
What is the name of your nursery that you get your vegetable soil mix from?
Tangela, this is my natural soil in this section, but when I buy some I get it from Tomar Garden Center. It is a local nursery.
thanks i bookmarked your site!
I havea real mess to fix, but i think your method will help me figure it out :)
Post a Comment