Probably a good time of the season to give you an update on this year’s corn trials! We’ve been trialing corn in the subarctic for about five years now and this may be our best season yet!
We’re into our second year trials of the Quick Start variety. We always run our trials for at least two seasons as there can be wild variability from season to season. For example, our first year with this variety wasn’t “over the top, whoa!” but this year it’s really putting on some great growth and height!
One of the things “they say” you cannot do is transplant corn. That’s nonsense and we’ve been doing it for years. But, there are some keys to it like growing your transplant in a decent size pot so the plant doesn’t get root bound early. Once we figured this out, we stopped getting “red stalks” which are an indicator the plant’s gone through stress.
We’re growing our corn in our standalone sub irrigated containers. We usually grow four stalks per bucket, corn really benefits from dense plantings so the pollination process happens. Essentially, the plant will put on tassels that produce pollen, then a bit later it produces silks that receive pollen. Ideally, wind will pollinate the plants and the dense planting helps the pollen hit the silks.
Since we’re not growing acres of corn, we do help our corn’s pollination a bit. We’ll cut off some of the tassels every few days and draw them along the silks by hand. We do this several times as each and every silk is connected to a kernel. So, to get a “full head” of corn, each silk must be uniquely pollinated.
One of the problems with northern corn is the production of tassels and silks isn’t exactly perfectly timed. The cool spring temperatures tend to cause the plant to throw on tassels early, we think it’s kind of a survival response of sorts. But, by the time it warms up in the summer, the silks lazily make their way out. Some northern growers do cut and store their tassels, but we’ve found enough pollen is left on the spent tassels to get fairly thorough pollination.
We’ve found growing northern corn to be quite rewarding. While it’s not worth it from the cost standpoint, since corn is stupidly cheap, it has been a challenging and fascinating crop to grow in the northern garden. We particularly enjoy seeing those stalks right outside our kitchen window, it kind of transports us into a farm-like mentality when we’re throwing down food.
We’re hoping for a bang up season of corn this year. Our warmer season has definitely been helping and we noticed slightly tighter timing between tassel and silk production this year. We’ll be on to another variety next season as we’re interested in seeing the different characteristics of various early and “northern” varieties.
