Photo Steve Albert, Harvest to Table
Well, we’ve had a lot of rain here in central Virginia: 6.3″ (16 cm) in 11 days from 4/26-5/6. The month of April landed us with 4.9″ (12.4 cm) and the first week of May with 2.6″ (6.6 cm). Last week I wrote about my worries for the beans and corn we’d sown before the big rains. The photo above is from Harvest to Table, a website for “beginner and veteran gardener alike”, with the goal of helping people “find easy solutions to common garden problems and . . . bring great food from your garden to your table.” I was happy to see our beans coming up 9 days after sowing, on Thursday! Thank goodness for raised beds! We had canals either side of the beds.
Photo Bridget Aleshire
And the corn started to come up 9 days after sowing, with wan little spikes poking up out of the ground. It remains to be seen how good or otherwise the stand is. I was looking at the top (road) end of the plot, where it is driest. I couldn’t even walk far into the plot as the soil was too sodden and I didn’t want to compact the soil. We always stay off wet soil if we start to sink in – compacting the soil just starves the roots of air and leaves the soil less free-draining than before, causing worse flooding problems. Our first sweet corn sowing is always a bit of a risk. In fact we prepare for this by sowing some corn seeds in styrofoam Speedling flats, the same day we sow the first corn planting outdoors. We float these on water in a tank we built from cinder blocks lined with carpet and plastic. (The carpet extends the life of the plastic.). It is possible to transplant sweet corn until it is about 2″ tall. The link takes you to Vern Grubinger at the University of Vermont, in a region where whole fields of corn are transplanted. We only transplant to fill gaps in our first sowing, if we need to.
Photo Pam Dawling
This floating technique comes from the tobacco growing industry. It works well for corn and onions, but it doesn’t work well for many vegetables – most can’t take continuous water and have to be drained some of the time. If early September is very hot, we use this technique for starting spinach seeds in hot weather. We float the Speedling flats in the daytime and pull them out to drain overnight.
Photo Kathryn Simmons
Back to sowing corn. We sow by hand, making furrows below ropes we stretch between stakes at the right row spacing. In normal conditions, we flood the furrow with water from a hose before we plant. This gives the seed enough water to get up out of the ground and saves worrying and saves a lot of time watering the soil after planting. We put new seed at 6″ and last year’s seed at 4″. Later we thin to 8-10″. I think this shows that different people’s idea of 4″ and 6″ vary a lot! After sowing we cover the seed with soil and tamp it down. We leave the ropes, as we’ve found they keep the crows off the corn seed. 10″ seems about the right height. About two weeks later we will sow our next corn, and at that point we move those stakes and ropes to mark out the new planting.
I wrote a blogpost for Mother Earth News Organic Gardening Blog, about transplanting broccoli (and other things) into hay mulch. You can see the post here.
And in case it’s raining where you are and you want to think about growing food while you can’t actually get out there and do it, here’s a video of the Succession Planting presentation I did at New Country Organics
