Tuesday, June 28, 2011

First! (to harvest garden sweet corn)

Well, it's not from the garden, per se. It's from the greenhouse.

When I got the keys to my greenhouse space, one of the first things I did was sow a bunch of field crop seeds. I didn't know if there would be a need for me to grow them in the greenhouse, but I did know that it can be a tricky proposition. Better to sketch out a quick SOP now than wait till I need one and then add a 6 month delay to the project as I figure it out on the fly...

So a couple seeds bought for my garden and 3 months later, and I had some sweet corn with dinner. You can see how poor pollination was (as I didn't make much of an effort to pollinate it myself). Still, not too bad considering the stand only had a half-dozen plants.

Neglect left the plants savaged by aphids and spider mites towards the end - which is just as well as I'd probably have left the ears till they were dry if I had kept waiting in vain for them to get to full size.

They did taste good though!

2 comments:

  1. Impressive none-the-less! I can imagine greenhouse growing being helpful to prevent heirloom varieties from getting contaminated.

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  2. Thanks!

    It's super easy to self-pollinate and preserve the genetic composition of heirloom corn varieties by bagging the ears and tassels in the field. I'll write a how-to post on it when my garden plot corn gets big enough.

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