Garden Update and Harvests - August 2, 2012

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I just returned from our annual beach vacation to Florida.  There is nothing like being gone for a week from your garden and being so excited to see what has changed since you left.

As expected I had a ton of tomatoes that ripened on the vine.  I harvested 13 pounds of ripe tomatoes to bring my grand total over 100 pounds for the year!  I am super excited about my tomato harvest this year.  The next thing that changed drastically was my purple hull and zipper cream field peas.  The zipper creams have exploded with pods and I can't wait to start harvesting.

Now for the bad news, something decimated my zucchini plants.  I don't know what it was but it completely ate the plants down to nothing.  I don't know if they will bounce back in time, and I may try one more planting for fall harvest.  I heard from my neighbor that we got lots of rain while I was gone, so all in all not a bad week.

Purple Hulls on the left

Zipper creams on the right loaded with pods

Close up of pea flowers before they form into pods.

The zipper creams are sprawling everywhere.

The silver queen corn shot up while I was gone.  

I have neglected this batch so I hope I get a few ears.

Hungarian Wax Pepper plants loaded with peppers.

Jalapeno peppers, Bell peppers, and Hungarian Wax peppers

Huge batch of tomatoes, over 13 pounds.

Garden Harvests - June 27, 2012

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It was a great week of harvests from the garden.  I have finally started harvesting tomatoes, bell peppers, and eggplants.  It was a nice change of pace from the usual squash harvests.  Speaking of squash, they are hanging by a thread and I will pull the last of the plants this weekend.  I had my second big corn harvest this week too, so my harvest totals shot up pretty good.  I am over 150 pounds for the year and climbing.  

We are still in a severe drought where I live in Georgia with no rain in site.  Many parts of the state have been helped with the tropical storms that have passed through but none of it reached us, praying for rain. 

Squash, Bell Peppers, and Tomatoes

I have been picking my tomatoes at this stage and letting them finish ripening inside.  I am afraid of them getting messed up by animals or bugs.  That green one fell off the plant while picking the others.

 

Eggplant #1 weighed 1.24 pounds

 

Eggplant #2, this one was long and slim.

 

Eggplant #3, this one weighed 1.44 pounds and was beautiful.

The color, shape, and size were picture perfect.

 

Corn harvested this week

Brings the total to 85 pounds for the year

 

 Here are a few ears I plucked during the week and they went 

straight to a pot of boiling water.  The taste was spectacular.

 

Here is the current drought monitor for Georgia.

It is much better overall, but I live in that band of red crossing the state.

Georgia Home Garden Corn Harvest

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I spent this morning harvesting the last of the corn from my Spring plantings.  I have been cherry picking ears for dinner this week, but I spent a few hours prepping and freezing the rest of the peaches and cream corn.  I harvested 42 pounds in this batch, and it was a lot of work.  I did everything outside using my big turkey fryer and cooler as seen detailed in this post here.  This made short work of the blanching part, but it is so hot outside today and very humid.  I ended up with nine more gallon sized freezer bags to add to my stockpile.  It was a productive morning. 

 I filled my basket twice

Here is the same basket after shucking

Final product, nine bags of corn.


I did a good job cleaning the weeds out last week and
this is what I am left with.  It shouldn't be too much work
to turn this around and get some peas in the ground and......


....I have already got my next batch of corn sprouting.
This is Silver Queen in one of my 4x4 raised beds.

Garden Harvests - June 4, 2012

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I have been waiting all Spring for this time of year, harvesting my peaches and cream sweet corn.  Overall I am a little disappointed in this first batch.  A combination of insufficient rain, with planting it too close, and letting the weeds get out of hand has really hurt my yields.  There are plenty of ears, but they are smaller in size.  A good sized ear is about 7 to 8 inches and I have some of those, but I have a lot of ears that are in the 4 to 5 inch range.  I harvested 30 during the week and will harvest the remaining next week.

I also harvested more yellow squash this week and I am freezing it for use throughout the year.  We are still in desperate need of rain and I pray that we get some in the next week.  God is good, I am blessed.

These are the best of the batch, 7 to 8 inch ears here.

Close up of a perfect peaches and cream ear.

 

Here are the rest of the ears, decent but small.

Here is a batch of squash ready to be processed for the freezer.

Corn Is Almost Ready

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I couldn't resist checking an ear of corn today out in the corn patch.  I knew it was getting close by the color and dryness of the silks.  The ear I checked has just a little more time to go.  The kernels were not fully formed all the way to the tip.  The fluid color was slightly milky, but still a little watery.  I guess I have about 7 to 10 days before it is fully ready and I can't wait.  This little gem still got plucked and went straight into a pot of boiling water.  Nothing like fresh corn.

My Garden Failures

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If you are a back yard gardener at some point you are going to have things that are complete failures.  If you have never had something fail in your garden, then give it time and you will.

My first failure this year was my attempt to grow cow peas next to my corn plot.  I don't know if I planted them too soon (probably), if I got some bad seed, or if I just didn't do something right.  I planted them twice and both times I got very sparse germination.  I feel like I am wasting 200 sq. ft. of good planting space fooling with these peas, so I decided to give up on them until the weather really gets hot.

My corn in that area is doing great, so I decided to plant an additional five rows of peaches and cream corn.  That gives me 250 feet of corn which I hope will produce a decent harvest.  This batch will be about a month behind my first planting. 

 Here is the corn, you can see the bare patch behind it

 

Corn is doing good, so I am doubling down on it.

How to Prevent Blown Over Corn

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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.

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.

How to Fix and Support Blown Over Corn

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We have gotten some really good rain the last two days. That is good for the garden, but sometimes bad for my corn. When growing corn in really fertile soil, it doesn't take much for your corn to be blown over when it is wet, at least that is my experience.

That is what I came home to tonight after work, two sides just completely blown down to the ground. It stinks too because the ears are just forming and being pollinated. Normally I can just mound up some dirt around each stalk to get it to stand upright, but not this time. The silver queen stalks are so tall, they just flopped back over.

While pondering what to do, I gazed over on my patio and noticed I had a bag of 3 foot bamboo poles and bag of those plastic electrical wire tires. I inserted the poles into the ground in the opposite direction of the fallen stalks. I then used the wire ties to support each stalk to the bamboo pole. Once I ran out of poles, I used the wire ties to support the tops of stalks to each other. It worked really well and I hope it will hold. This method will work well for small plantings of backyard corn, and it is really easy to do.

This is the flattened peaches and cream corn.

This is the silver queen laid out on my eggplant and peppers.

Here are the results after supporting with bamboo and wire ties.

The corn is over 7 ft tall.

Close up of support system

Here are two stalks wired together toward their top.

How To Know When Corn is Ready to Harvest

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I recently harvested another batch of corn, and I feel like I am getting better at knowing when my corn is ready to harvest.  Now there is tons of information on the web about this topic, but I am going to share what I have learned.  I hope this will help some people because even with all the information out there on this topic, I was still unsure at times on when to harvest my corn.

Lastly before I describe the steps, DO NOT rely on seed packet harvest recommendations or certain time frames on how long ears should form.  The batch of corn from this post is a perfect example.  It was peaches and cream corn and is supposed to be 83 days to harvest.  This batch came in at 61 days from start to finish!

I will break this information into three categories on how I tell when my corn is ready:  Size and feel of ear, silk color and dryness, and most importantly kernel fluid.  I have posted pictures showing examples of each category.

Step 1: Size and Feel of Ear -  This is what I use as a starting point.  How big is the ear?  Does it feel full and do the kernels feel formed all the way to the top of the ear?  Is the plant leaning toward one side?  This for me is the least reliable of all methods, but this is where I start when I think ears are getting close.

Step 2: Silk Color and Dryness - What I have found is that you can't just look at the silk color and when it is brown pull the ear.  What is brown?  Are we talking light brown, medium brown, dark brown?  Each variety of corn is gonna vary so the color isn't as reliable an indicator to me as the dryness.  When the corn silks first form they have kind of a glossy sheen to them.  When an ear is ready to be picked the silk will look really dry almost like straw.  If I find an ear in this condition, I move on to step 3 for my final judgement.

Step 3: Kernel Fluid Color - This is the final and most important step.  I expose the tip of the corn ear and then pierce one of the kernels with my finger tip.  If the fluid comes out milky, then it is perfect and it is ready to harvest.  If the fluid comes out clear, you are a little too early, cover the ear back up and wait a few more days.  If no fluid comes out, but squirts starchy gunk then you have waited too long.  There is nothing wrong with the ear at this stage, it just won't be at the optimal sweetness.

I hope this information is helpful, please see the pictures below for details.

Step 1:  See how this corn plant is leaning.  You won't always have this, but this actually prompted me to take a closer look at this batch since this corn was only sixty days old.  Sure enough 75% of the corn was ready to be picked upon further inspection.


Step 1: This is the ear of corn from the leaning stalk.  Look at how big and full it looks, you could feel the kernels too at the tip.


Step 2:  From the same batch of corn, here is a perfect example of what the silk will look like when ready to harvest.  Notice how dry it looks, but it is not necessarily dark brown.  Color is not always the best indicator.


Step 3: I expose the tip of the ear, and you can see the kernels were fully formed to the tip even though there was some damage on this ear from ants / silk worms.  This is why I do not trust feel alone, many times bugs will eat away the tips of your ears and they won't feel full at the tip even though they are ready.


Step 3:  Finally, I pierce a kernel and look for milky discharge.  This is just right.


If you follow the three steps listed above, you should have great looking corn picked at its peak like this.

Corn Harvest Round 2 - Peaches and Cream

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This morning I noticed one of my corn plants was leaning to one side and upon inspection I realized it was the weight of the ear pulling it in the direction it was leaning. I was not expecting for this corn to be ready yet because it was only at 61 days since planting, but sure enough most of it was ready. I had to get it in gear this morning and prepare everything for freezing.  For more detail on how I prepare my corn for freezing see this post.

This batch came from one of my 4X8 raised beds that I planted 72 seeds spaced 10 inches apart. The total harvest this morning was 33 ears with a total weight of 16.40 pounds. I expect to get an additional 10 to 15 ears from what is left, but they will be the smaller runts of the group. I was hoping to get one ear per plant for a total of 70 ears, but it looks more like I will get 45 to 50 ears.

This was my second planting. I have a third planting that is about a foot tall, and I am going to experiment with ammonium nitrate fertilizer on it. I am hoping that this will create more explosive growth and more production of ears. I look forward to trying a few ears tonight with some BBQ ribs.

Here is my harvest basket full of peaches and cream corn.

Here are the ears right before I bagged them.

Nice little corn pyramid, 33 ears total.

Bagged, tagged, and ready for the freezer.

Hand Pollinating Corn 101

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For some folks this may be common knowledge, but I have decided to post some general information on how corn pollinates. I also wanted to include some tips on how I assure proper corn pollination for my home garden.

Corn has a male and a female part and both are needed during pollination just like any plant. The tassel (male) forms at the top of the corn plant, and the silk (female) forms in the middle to lower portion of the plant. The pollen forms on the male tassel in what looks like grains of rice.  The grains of rice are what contain the actual pollen inside them and they are called anthers. Mother Nature uses wind to blow the pollen from the anthers on the tassel and hopefully it lands on a corn silk to complete pollination.  This is why it is preferable to plant corn in blocks in a home garden rather than one long row.  With one row plantings of corn, there is a good chance the wind would just blow your pollen away from the plants.  Each silk on an ear of corn is connected to one corn kernel on the ear and all must be pollinated for the kernel to fully form.

Some people hand pollinate their corn by shaking the stalks, but I prefer actually running my hand across the tassel to collect some pollen anthers in my hand. I then sprinkle them into the silk on the lower portion of the plant. This works great for small gardens assuming you have the time and are tall enough to reach the pollen on the tassel of the corn stalk. I am 6' 2'' so this is not a problem for me. I like this method better than just shaking the plants because I have found the wind will blow the grains of pollen away from the plant while shaking.

For an even more detailed description on corn pollination, see the link below.
http://www.uwex.edu/ces/crops/Pollination.htm

Up close view of pollen anthers on tassel

To self pollinate, run hands across tassel to grab some pollen anthers

Then sprinkle them in your corn silks to aid in pollination

Close up of corn silk after hand pollinating

Here is a shot of my corn, 4x8 bed of Peaches and Cream, 72 plants