The Lower Garden

The lower area garden is my new experiment this year along with the side garden by the veggie pickup area.  

In this area below I have planted sweet corn (left side) in successive rows over the past 6 weeks.  And the corn that was planted week 1 is almost the same height as the corn planted 2 weeks ago.  I have no way to explain this other than they are different varieties with different growing lengths?  The first 3 rows were a shorter 68 day variety of corn and the rest are longer varieties of 79-85 days so maybe the longer growing varieties produce larger corn and stalks?  

Mike has also reminded me how hard it is to grow organic corn.  Actually, his tactic goes more like this "you know you are only going to get 30-40 ears of corn out of all that corn out there-- you should have planted an acre of corn".  Talk about motivation.  That's all I needed.   I've spent several hours hand planting that corn-- it WILL grow and be wonderful.  I've been counting the seeds I've planted in that area and there are about 3,000 planted corn seeds so far.  Assuming 50% make it that's 1,500 ears of corn or more.  In my effort to prove him wrong, I have been investigating organic ways to protect the sweet corn and ensure a great crop in case the corn bugs come out.  This involves buying some beneficial insects in a few weeks and then as the corn tassels I'll need to buy another organic substance and go to all 1,500 ears of corn and put the substance on the corn tassel to keep those nasty corn worms off the corn.  

So here's to Mike being wrong and us all having a wonderful organic sweet corn crop.....if you know of any tricks for organic corn or to keep the worms away-- please let me know.  

The other part of the garden is sunflowers, watermelons, pumpkins and tomatoes.  All growing very nicely.