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corn

750 views 6 replies 5 participants last post by  Don Armstrong 
#1 ·
I've grown up on a farm and in the middle of corn country; planted some sweet corn in the garden this year and it's been growing real good; plenty of rain to water deep but not standing water. I noticed yesterday now it's about waist high and is tassling. Which "shouldn't" happen until it's a couple feet taller.

What causes this and how to prevent it in the future? Plenty of good soil, manure on it etc.
 
#2 ·
The variety you have is doing what is in it's genes. There are numerous lengths of time required for maturiety. The earlier variety types tend to have shorter stalks. How many days has the corn been planted? The early corn takes from 65 to 75 days The later types take around 85 days give or take some.
 
#3 ·
uncle Will in In. said:
The variety you have is doing what is in it's genes. There are numerous lengths of time required for maturiety. The earlier variety types tend to have shorter stalks. How many days has the corn been planted? The early corn takes from 65 to 75 days The later types take around 85 days give or take some.
boy oh boy oh boy do I feel dumb. :eek: :haha: I should've known that. I know about the days to maturity...and this *is* an early variety. 70 days I think. I've never grown this kind before so *that* part of it didn't even occur to me. LOL I'm used to corn fields you walk 5 rows into and get lost in. LOL
Thanks. :D
 
#4 ·
When I was growing up our neighbor man worked on the railroad section gang. One of their jobs was to clean out the boxcars that were put on the siding to be filled with grain by the elevator. He came home with some seed corn he found spilled on the floor. He planted about 12 rows over 200 feet long in his truck patch. It all grew, and grew, and grew! It got nearly 15 feet tall, and had ears about a foot long around 8 feet above the ground. They had 13 kids, but had married them off down to about 8. They canned a bunch of it, and ate it as roasting ears. What was left over was stored for their pig. The local yokels decided it had to be the old open polliated Hickory Cane corn grown in the south. It would be easy to get lost in a field of that, even if you were on a horse. I don't really know how good it was. They also ate the lungs out of hogs, chicken heads and feet, plus possums. We ate field corn as roasting ears it the sweet corn wasn't ready yet. Now there is corn that has body and flavor.
 
#6 ·
uncle will,

my dad used to grow the hickory cane though I always thought he said hickory *king* but he's a southerner and king could be cane ;)

at any rate the stuff was huge (tall) but took all summer to grow. He grew it up until just the last couple of years or so. He'd plant one patch of that for late in the summer and then some short season corn. I think he plants all illini sweet now.

so far as what it tasted like, well it tasted like corn ;) not sweet like sweet corn but sweeter than the canned stuff you buy. you didn't pick it until the water was boiling though!

I don't know where he got the seed, I just assumed he bought it but he saves seed every year and still has some seed from plants his mother grew and she's been dead 20 years!

Mel-

re-reading that I don't mean the seed is 20 years old, but that he grew some of her seed, saved the seed from them and so forth.
 
#7 ·
Ken Scharabok has been on a quest for the old-fashioned Hickory one-or-the-other. It's been covered here - there are BOTH Cane and King. Probably find it with a search on this site for "Hickory".

On the original subject, plants grow. What they grow can be either plant (leaves and stalks) or seeds. If they grow less plant then they've got more energy available to put into fruiting bodies (heads, cobs, grain). One of the big advances in wheat yield since I was a boy has been because of introducing "Mexican dwarf" genes into cereal wheat varieties. They grow less stalk, so more energy to put into grain. They also don't go down or "lodge" as much as the old 5"-high varieties used to, so your harvest averages a higher percentage of what is there. I'd imagine the same is true of maize.
 
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