How are your sweet corn plants growing? Flavor and color? Last year photos show a lot of tillering, were those plants more or less productive for you? This year?
Here are some of mine. Sandy soil, foggy days, so it’s short. Not mature enough for eating yet. I’m growing with runner beans and mostly Chilacoyote (some pepo).
Mine are about a foot to 1 1/2 ft tall so not really doing super.
Do you know why? My flour corn tasseled about that tall (1-2 feet) except for the packet of N Fixing corn from EFN which looks great. I’ll post photos tomorrow of that block.
Here’s my tiny front yard sweet corn patch, ranging from 3’ to 6’ tall, doing well in my crappy sandy fill soil with the addition of urine and some conventional organic fertilizer. Big ears, red kernals among the yellow and some really beautiful purple and reds. All delicious. Growing with moschata squash, sweet potatoes, and runner beans, none of which are doing as well as the corn. Also among some butterfly weed, garlic chives, lavender, rugosa rose, etc. No corn earworm, which is so nice. Someone please tell me how to save seed from such a tiny patch with only one or 2 ears per plant. I am new to doing this with corn! Thank you!
Here’s my second planting. It’s smaller than I’d like because I’m still waiting on the house painter and I need to leave access to paint the shed in a couple weeks. Assuming they are done by 9/15, I’ll plant the rest of the space for a late crop.
This is a mix of 1/3 GTS, 1/3 Desert White Sweet from Native Seeds/Search (which did well for me last year, in spite of being flattened by a hurricane), and 1/3 random other seeds leftover in my seed box. This batch gets selected for heat tolerance.
I saved 8 oz of seed or so from the first planting (all GTS, with a bias towards planting all the purple seeds courtesy of my 3 year old helper),
Question on seed return: I’ve got one plant in this planting that is running 3 weeks earlier than everything else. That’s valuable, but the seed is going to be inbred. Do we want it in next year’s mix with hopes that it will find something else similarly early to cross with?
I’ve crossed my gts mix this year with my “ultra early sweet” mix. If my gts mix seed matures (it’s getting down to the wire here probably only a week left until frost) I’d like to return my super early mix. Might be a good companion to your early sweet corn. Added bonus, it was really cold here all of June so any corn I return showed excellent cold soil emergence.
My opinion is yes, those early genetics would be valuable in the mix!
Do you know about if they include the super sweet genes? Wondering because of the information/experience in this thread.
and wondering if we need more clarification for contributions to the sweet corn mix, @Lowell_McCampbell are you the corn steward still for this year?
And thank you Rachel and @RayS for your explanations, if you have any insight here.
I can’t say with absolute certainty that there is no super sweet contamination. I was not aware of this issue, thank you for sharing the thread.
I can refrain from sharing any corn seed if the super sweet genes are causing pollination/deformation problems.
Hi, did your corn plants start to turn brown? The cobs left on the stalks will droop and fall over and dry and cure the seed. Check out the course on the GTS website, Center of Origin: Traditional Farming Methods in Southern Mexico – Going to Seed . There are videos explaining how to select cobs for saving seed and corn kernals from the cob. With a smaller patch, maybe start by saving 4 different colored cobs that have dried and cured kernals. Rub off the kernals on both ends, about an inch, save the middle kernals for seed from the cob. This practice is according to the video in the online class.
Thanks very much, Kim. Very helpful! And I’ll watch the videos. The plants are browning and most of the husks dried out.
Oh okay, sounds good. Your seed crop should make it before you get a freeze. Be happy to see pictures of them as you get through each step while harvesting.
I’ll try to take some photos. Thanks again.
I did not get any corn to harvest this year. Maybe next year will be better. I think the weather was to fault.
