Garden 2011: Planting Corn

Jo planting corn while Rusty watches intently. Dogs believe dog treats are the one and only small items ever contained within small bags. One year we when we weren't paying attention, Rusty dug up and ate several of the green beans Jo had planted. We kept a watchful eye on him this time.

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Garden 2011: Planting Corn

Tuesday, 10/16/07

Spent most of the day trying to get back into my daily groove (rut?) after returning from an art fair in Springfield (MO) this past weekend.

This afternoon I did a little cleaning up out in the garden. I cut down and removed the dried corn stalks and tossed them on the brush pile out behind the garden. We'd decided to save the dried out ears of corn that remained on the stalks for the squirrels. Evidently, the squirrels got wind of our plan and decided to go ahead and help themselves. This morning I saw a squirrel carrying an ear of corn across the yard. When I got out to the garden this afternoon, I noticed several bare corn cobs laying around the garden. And, when I started removing the stalks, I found no ears of corn that still had any corn left on them. They'd been shucked and eaten on the stalks. Nothing except a bare cob remained.

I really don't have a problem with the squirrels salvaging the corn we didn't get eaten, but now that the corn is gone and the squirrels have identified the garden as a source of food, I certainly hope that they don't move on to our remaining tomatoes.

Tuesday, 10/16/07

Sunday, 8/26/07

Electric Fence: I discovered the electric fence around our garden off this morning. I briefly looked around to see if I could spot a problem. The only thing I discovered was that the ground fault adapter into which the fence charger is plugged had tripped. When I reset the breaker the fence worked fine. Later, Jo told me that our electricity had been off for about 30 seconds earlier in the morning. That kind of surge usually causes the ground fault to trip so I reckon that was the problem.

Corn: Jo picked our first ears of corn late this afternoon. About 15 minutes later we were eating it. Delicious!!! Between poor germination and the cottontails, I really wasn't sure if we were going to get any corn this year. I still doubt that we'll get enough to put any in the freezer, but we can certainly enjoy what we've got while we've got it.

Weather: Up to 96º today, a full ten degrees warmer than yesterday. Summer refuses to make way for early fall.

Sunday, 8/26/07

Garden

Corn and Squash: We kept the corn and squash covered with wire and protected from the rabbits for as longs as we could, but finally had to remove the wire. Some of the corn and especially the squash were really starting to suffer from the confinement. Besides, with the wire in place we couldn't weed or edge the bed and the weeds were about to get out of hand. So, we removed the wire tunnels and set the veggies free. The squash immediately headed for the aisle where it knows it isn't supposed to grow.



Since removing the wire, we've gotten the two corn beds edged, weeded and mulched. The cottontails have eaten a few of the shorter corn plants down at one end, but the damage hasn't been severe yet. Maybe the corn will make it.

Green Beans: Jo planted a row of green beans to see if we could get in a second crop this summer. We knew better than to tempt the rabbits with those. We immediately covered the beans with part of the wire we'd removed from the corn and squash. The beans are sprouting well, and they aren't getting eaten by the rabbits.

Cucumbers: The cucumbers are still producing like crazy -- many, many more cukes than I can get eaten. Jo has suggested we try drying them and burning cucumbers in the wood stove next winter. That's an idea.

Tomatoes: We've been eating a few tomatoes, especially the cherry tomatoes. We're getting close to getting into our major tomato harvest and doing some tomato canning. The tomatoes are suffering some rabbit damage. The cottontails are knocking off a lot of the lower fruits. They nibble on a few of them, but mainly it just seems as if they get under the plants and then jump up and down knocking the tomatoes off.

Garden

Wednesday, 7/4/07

Tomatoes: The first tomatoes of the 2007 gardening season are almost ripe. These are a variety of cherry tomato.

Blackberries: Jo decided that today was the day to venture up to our pasture and pick blackberries. We'd been picking a few ripe berries off the plants closer to the house for a few days now. She figured she ought to be able to easily get a couple of quarts from the numerous berry vines that are taking over -- along with honey locust -- what used to be our upper pasture.

Dressing appropriately for berry picking is important. Jo couldn't take on the chiggers, ticks, snakes and berry vine thorns in the shorts and sandals she normally wears around our place during the summer. Instead, she donned tennis shoes, tall socks, long pants tucked into the socks and her green bean picking "gloves". Jo also applied some commercial insect repellent and took along a stick for fending off the snakes. All that garb plus a couple of plastic buckets made for quite a sight. I wanted to take a photo, but feared strangulation by camera strap if I tried, so the berry picking expedition went undocumented.

Jo didn't end up spending much time berry picking. She returned with a couple of dozen blackberries, about a zillion stick-tights of various types clinging to her shoes, socks and pants legs and five tick that were still crawling around looking for a nice, juicy home. It seems the birds and critters had beaten us to the blackberries up on the pasture.

Mowing: I've been doing some mowing and stockpiling the grass clippings so that we can use them to mulch the two corn beds when we remove the wire tunnels. It just isn't worth the effort to remove the wire, mulch and then replace the tunnels. All those grass clipping ought to be in pretty rank condition by the time we get around to using them, though.

Wednesday, 7/4/07

Thursday, 6/28/07

Butterflies: There are lots of butterflies around these days, just waiting to have their photos taken. Now...... If only all those little skippers and hairstreaks wore name tags so I could tell them apart and get them accurately identified.


Cucumbers: The first of the season are ready to harvest. Last year we didn't get a single cuke out of the garden, but that was my fault. The plants were up and doing well. Jo had put some fabric row cover on the squash to let them get a good start protected from the squash bugs. The squash did fine with the row cover over them until they began blooming. Then, the cover had to be removed so they could get pollinated. I asked her to put some fabric row cover over the cucumbers too. She did. The cukes baked to death in one day. Live and learn, I reckon -- and learn to live without cucumbers.




Corn: The corn is doing well inside its wire tunnel, safe and protected from the cottontails -- and I'm still keeping my figures crossed that the rabbits don't find a way into our makeshift enclosure.

Thursday, 6/28/07

Wednesday, 6/27/07

Very little rain fell today, only .15 of an inch -- just enough to cut Jo's morning walk with the dogs short. There were several times during the day that it looked as if it might rain but didn't. We are right on the very edge of the weather system that's dumping so much rain on north central Texas and Oklahoma.

Jo picked green beans, but only got a little over three pounds today. Production is obviously winding down dramatically. There are very few blooms or small beans left on the plants in the garden, and the rabbits seem to have escalated their attack. They're not just coming into the garden and nibbling; a couple of cottontails seem to have taken up residence in the bean bed. I chase them out every time I go out to the garden, but they return. Still, Jo's managed to get 29 quarts of green beans into the deep freeze. That's a lot better than we've done in several years.

I cleaned a bunch of leaves out from under our north porch, shredded them with the lawnmower and applied them as mulch in the garden, plus some bed edging and weeding.

The newly emerging corn survived the night thanks to the wire enclosures Jo and I rigged. Those wire tunnels are a nuisance, but they get the job done.

Wednesday, 6/27/07

Tuesday, 6/26/07

Rain...

Thundershowers around off and on all day. We received a light shower early this morning and some heavier rainfall a little before noon. It looked as if another shower was heading our way during the late afternoon, but it went around. All totaled, we only received .4" of rain. More rain is in our forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, an 80% chance, they say. We'll see.

Garden...

Electric Fence: I used the Weedeater to trim the grass under the electric fence so that it wouldn't touch the bottom wire and ground out the fence. When I trim under the electric fence, I really scalp the vegetation down to bare ground, hoping that it will give up and not grow back. No such luck, though. Were I to accidentally scalp another spot in the yard that badly, the grass/weeds would surely die, but not under that bottom wire. It always grows back.

Corn: The third planting Jo did toward the end of last week is sprouting well. However, the cottontails have been thick in the garden and we figured those tender, young shoots didn't stand much of a chance of not becoming rabbit food. But...... Jo came up with an idea. We had a few welded wire hoops that weren't in use elsewhere. There were two problems with using those hoops on the corn, though. For one thing, we didn't have enough to cover the two corn beds. Also, the mess on those hoops is 2" X 4". A rabbit can get through a hole that big with no problems.

Jo's idea was to use the welded wire tunnels that we had for support and then stretch chicken wire along the length of the beds. We also had 1" mess chicken wire cut to the length of the beds on hand because that's what I use to cover the beds after I get them heavily mulched in the fall. We have to use the chicken wire to keep the armadillos from tilling in the newly applied mulch.

So we installed the welded wire tunnels and rolled the chicken wire out over the top of them. It looks as if this system ought to keep the rabbits out of the corn. If it doesn't work, I'll always think it should have.

This is a temporary installation that will only stay on long enough for the corn to get a little bit of height. Still, I hate having covering the corn with wire. Weeding, mulching, bed edging or even mowing up close to the bed is impossible with the wire in place. If you need to do any of those chores, you need to add about 45 minutes to your time allotted to the project just to get the wire off and then re-installed.

I'll bet the mythical Farmer Brown didn't have so much trouble getting a few ears of sweet corn. Of course, Farmer Brown probably had at least a couple of outside dogs and/or shot every rabbit he saw.

Squash: We had a nice squash vine growing out of the compost pile so I decided leave it and let it grow.



Leaving the squash plant to grow is a mistake. I know I'll regret that decision. The plant will continue growing and growing, taking up more and more space. Soon we won't even be able to get to our compost pile. But this squash plant was so much farther along than what we've recently planted in the garden, I just couldn't bring myself to do away with it.

Tuesday, 6/26/07

Garden Update

Corn: Jo bought some fresh seed on her trip to town Wednesday and replanted the corn for the third time Thursday afternoon. The third time had better be the charm -- or else, we're going to be getting our corn from the Jolly Green Giant.

Green Beans: Jo (and the dogs) did the first big picking Wednesday afternoon. They picked 18 and a half pounds. That evening, Jo and I snapped them all. (The dogs claimed that not having and opposed thumb made it impossible for them to help with the snapping.) Thursday, Jo got all the beans into the freezer.

Garden Update

Garden

Corn: We've pretty much decided that our problem with the corn is germination because the few corn plants that did come up haven't gotten eaten. I guess that's what we get for using some seed left over from last year. The seed was stored in the deep freeze, but evidently it has still gone bad. We'll have to get some more seed the next time we go into town. It's getting awfully late to be getting corn planted, though. It will be plenty hot and dry by the time it matures.

Squash: That's winter squash coming up behind the corn. The plan was for it to grow between the two rows of corn. The way it's going now, the squash may end up having that bed all to itself.

Green Beans: Jo still hasn't done that second picking. She says that Tuesday is the day for that. We did get the deep freeze defrosted and cleaned out, getting ready for all thos pints of green beans we'll put into it.

Garden

Broccoli

We're enjoying a lot of fresh broccoli and Jo is getting some into the freezer too.

I reckon we officially finished getting our spring garden planted last Saturday when Jo planted both summer on winter squash. Everything is doing well -- much better than the past couple of years -- except for the corn. Jo has already replanted once and we still only have a few small plants growing in those two beds. I don't know if we're having problems with germination or if something (like cottontails) is eating the corn plants as soon as they sprout -- maybe a combination of the two. We haven't given up on the corn yet, but it's getting awfully late in the season.

Broccoli