Terry Coombs wrote:
songbird wrote:

....re sweet corn...

we eat so little of it these past few years that we
don't grow it. no problems with me from the sweet
corn varieties we've had (peaches and cream seems to
be one type i recall).

Â* A neighbor gave me some seeds of that variety ! Of course it was a
couple of years back , don't know what the germ rate might be now .
Probably best to buy new . I'm buying new for some other stuff too ,
open pollination has resulted in some odd stuff - squashes in particular .

that would seem rather strange because you say you
are in an isolated area from surrounding gardens/
gardeners. unless the seed had already been crossed
when sent to you to begin with.

here the local pollinators for the squash are the
mostly native bees/bumblebees/mason bees which are
great to see IMO. i wish we had more of them about.
i always want to grow some squash/cucumbers just to
give them more early season source of food (later
season the cosmos work for that for them).


if you have critter problems corn is the one plant
we decided it just wasn't worth growing for how little
we eat it. raccoons all around us and no way for me
to easily fence them out for a few $. in order to
grow corn here we'd need a new fence with a very good
gate and electric hot wires to keep them from climbing
over (not worth the price in comparison to what else
we grow).

Â* Raccoons and corn seems to be a recurring theme ... I'll probably
have to upgrade parts of my chicken wire and electric setup . Because we
do have a pretty large 'coon population here .

you will. if you are the only clearing in the woods
and trying to grow corn you're going to be a magnet
for them (and never be able to trap them enough to
remove them as a potential threat).

that is one thing i've learned here. it is useless
to try to trap out any species that is around here.
we can have fields on three sides of us growing corn
and the raccoons will still eat corn from our gardens
if we plant it.

in an armageddon situation we could likely get all
of our meat needs met by small game trapping. there's
at least a half dozen rabbits out there right now and
tons of tracks even in the new snow we've had.


songbird