I’m going to disrupt my previous chain of thought on raised beds with a recent discovery. We’ve debunked yet another garden myth! Boy, the field of growing and gardening sure has a lot of these!
We are pretty new to growing corn, it just hasn’t been super viable at extreme latitudes and only somewhat recently have genetics become available that make it practical. We were planning on expanding our crop this year since we were so successful in 2022. What I didn’t catch, though, was that corn seed is one of those “replace annually” types of seeds, kind of like onions. Yeah, we didn’t do that and it’s too late to fix it now. So, we planted our 2022 seeds anyway, with two seeds per site, and hoped for the best.
Our initial research into corn seed viability filled us with a bit of dread. More than one source stated it was “impossible” to use “old” corn seed, basically saying our entire crop was doomed. What a bunch of dirty, rotten liars the people on the internet are! Not only are we seeing exceptional second year seed viability, it’s almost as good as it was the first year! I’m kind of regretting dropping two seeds into each growing site as now I have way too many corn plants to cut off.
While the same thing is said about onions, allium seed viability definitely sees a marked drop after the first year. It’s still perfectly viable, but you do have to oversow by about 50 percent. 3rd year, you oversow about 75-100%. It’s interesting to see such a varied difference between two supposed “one year viable” seeds.
This is one of the main reasons why we test practically everything that we say here, and definitely everything we put on our website. There’s so much crazy information out there in the growing world and we aren’t here to parrot what the rest of the growing world is saying!
Reminder, we’ve got our livestream coming up in a couple hours here. Looking forward to it and see you all soon! Link in comments.
