On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:13:38 +0200, horselover wrote:


Another corn question - The corn that I grew this year had some cobs
with bare areas with few or no kernels. Is this because of poor
pollination? This corn patch is a square of 16 plants, 4 rows of 4 each.
three rows were Golden Bantam, one row was a butter and sugar hybrid
called Epi d'Or (I live in France, hence the French variety name.)

Poor pollination. You might try hand pollinating, as you're growing so
few plants of each cultivar. To do this, watch for the pollen starting
to be released from the tassels -- in most cultivars, this happens about
two days before the silks are ready. Break off a couple of the tassels
and brush the tassels that are shedding pollen all over the silks. Repeat
every day for about 8 days (break off some fresh tassels each time, so
the pollen should be nicely viable), and you should see good pollination.

If you don't want your corn to mature all at once, you can also plant
serially... one row this week, one row the next, etc., etc.

Another cause of poor pollination is heat damage just before the tassels
are mature. Pollen formation is quite heat sensitive, so temps much over
100oF/38oC can do some real damage if the heat comes at the wrong time in
the growth cycle.

I also wondered - why is corn planted in hills? Fields of corn are
obviously not, but all home gardeners I know plant corn in hills. Is it
to give the roots an easier time in looser dirt?

There's probably some advantage to it for early plantings in areas with
lots of spring moisture. Sweet corn is much more sensitive to some of the
soil fungi, and because it tends to need more heat to emerge than field
corn does, if you plant it in a hill, there's 1) good drainage to help
keep the soil fungi somewhat suppressed and 2)the hill is a smaller
amount of soil, so heats faster in the daytime. That's the reason most
sweet corn seed sold here is treated with a fungicide. All that said, I've
never bothered to hill corn when I lived in the midwest, and now that I
live in a cool Mediterranean climate, I plant in furrows with seeds I've
pre-sprouted on sand in the house -- I plant just as the radicle (first
root) is emerging.

Kay