Growing Sweet Corn | Recipe For Success

hey guys welcome back to the channel just stepped out here to make a video about the corner and we'll get to that here in a second but I thought I'd give you a look around the backyard here this is what we see when we step out got a kinda shot here sorry about the wiggly camerawork I don't have a tripod but there's the main gardens over there there's the blue lace red wine box and the raised bed hey I'm some money chickens they're back here in their house there's a sweet corn pot we're going to talk about here in a second there's the buff lace bra my house over there that's a garden shed we converted it into a chicken house under the storage shed and that Center in the shop there that's the sweet potatoes chicken tractor over there on the left but we'll get down here and talk about this corn and I'll be right back with you [Music] okay guys we're down here at the corn patch and it's growing away today is the 1st of July and they have that same knee-high by the 1st of July but we'll swing around here and see if we can't find Tina oh oh there she is good see Tina is 4 foot 10 and I believe we made it okay guys one of the first questions that we normally get is how far apart do we plant our sweet corn and the answer to that is about 6 inches apart hopefully you can you can see we pack them in there pretty dense that helps with the wind and keeping the ground shaded but our lows if I can get a look back through here maybe you can see our rows are about 16 inches apart so we keep them keep the rows pretty tight and if you can see down in there that ground is mostly shaded in between them so that helps with the watering also helps keep the wind - we keep that we keep the plants really dense and got to have good ground and keep the fertilizer to them to keep them that close together but about 16 inches rows 16 inches apart and plants at about 16 inch intervals hey guys hopefully from this angle you can see another trick that we use and that is there's three different types of corn here there's about four rows of one type the taller type here four rows down the center of a shorter type and four rows here on the outside they're a little bit taller type well what we do is the outside rows are a ninety one day corn after 10 days at 81 days we fill in any skips with an 81 day corn and then we plant in the rest of the 81 day corn when 10 days has elapsed from that we go back over and we plant our 71 day corn and we fill in any skips in the 81 day corn and what that results in is a little bit of variation in height but we have full corn patch all of the skips have been filled in most of them anyway and that's how we that's how we get a full patch using days that overlap each other in ten day increments but we have a 90 day corn we fill that in with an 81 day corn baby one day corn we fill in with a 71 day corn and then all of it will mature on the same date and we'll have one harvest of sweet corn okay guys another question we get asked a lot about is weeding and we do not weed the sweet corn constantly you read our sweet corn one time and we do not weed between the plants but at about 18 inches tall hopefully you can see down in here but there are no weeds between the rows about 18 inches tall we take a weed whacker and run down through there and scald the weeds off in between the rows but we do not weed in between the plants but by the time they're 18 inches tall they're pretty much tall enough to handle the wrong weeds but we can get down in here and see that between the rows there just isn't much weed growth they shade it out and the weeds between the plants don't seem to affect the overall growth of the corn it seems to be doing really well so that's how we handle weeding okay guys another question we get is do we Hill our corn and the answer to that is no we don't it's not to say it's wrong but we found that with the tight rows and the type plant placement we get a lot of good wind resistance and we also found that for a lot of years we planted our corn too shallow we we started planting our corn at 2 and 1/2 inches the depth that it recommended and we found out that the anchor roots don't have any problems reaching the ground when you plant it the correct planting does so it it might help some of you if you're used to hilling your corn and you want to save some time try planting at 2 and a half inches and try planning your plants a little bit closer together and it has saved us a ton of work over the years okay we're down here at the other end of the corn patch let's talk for a second about fertilizer and by now you guys ought to have a pretty good idea of the size of our corn patch it's 12 rows deep about 50/50 feet or so long but when we follow eyes we fertilize three times we use a straight nitrogen 3400 but this patch here took a 50-pound bag about a week before we plant it it took another 50-pound bag the day that it turned 18 inches the day we fertilize that is the one and only time that we weed and I think we covered that and the next time that will fertilize the third and final time is it is when the corn begins to tassel you have to excuse the chickens they're rude but uh anyway we fertilize our corn three times we use 3400 and the first at planting the second at 18 inches and the third when it begins to tassel to help with your formation all right guys one of the next questions that were usually asked is do we spray our corn and yes we do a lot of people won't admit to that but we will we we use a liquid 7 concentrate on the corn until the corn begins to tassel and then we switch over to BT that's considered garden safe and organic but the BT helps with worms and keeps out the cob and worms that eat up your colon but we do spray our corn and we use a concentrated liquid 7 on it until it's probably a little bit taller than this and the tassels will start to come out and once the tassels are out we switch to BT that way we're not spraying 7 on the edible part of the corn but uh we do spray and we enjoy feeding ourselves rather than feeding the bugs alright I'm standing here by the bridge going across the creek to answer this next question and that is how do we keep raccoons and stuff out of our corn and I wanted to give you a shot of just how close there's the orchard there we'll swing around here pass the stick pile but just how close our corn is to that Creek it's maybe 40 50 feet and has a crow flies but I go out here on this end of the corn closest to the creek we use box traps and we set the traps here on the end and we bait them with canned sweet corn but that's what they're up here looking for but we found that the after a day and a night in the trap tend to not want to come back so what we do is we'll leave them in the box trap and then later the following afternoon when they've been trapped the night before will point the trap back here towards the creek and we'll hose them down real good with a garden hose and we keep the hose on as we open the trap and they usually make a beeline right for the creek that's not to say we don't keep a shotgun on standby but in all the years that we've released right back we've never had one turn and offered a fight and after a night and a day and a trap and a good hosing down they have a tendency not to be in a big hurry to come back so that's how we deter them out of the corn patch okay one last question we get is when did we pick our sweet corn and the answer to that is we wait until about oh say 30% of the corn is soaked and then we start counting 19 days so at 19 days from about the time 30% of it is soaked we'll go out and start checking it we'll peel back in here and bust a kernel open with a fair nail and if that's still milky white and good and sweet and soft then we go ahead and harvest it we take all the corn at one time we planted it to mature all at once even though there's three varieties but I will take it all at once but we start checking the corn at 19 days after about a 30 percent silk okay guys we're going to go ahead and wrap this up we had a lot of fun out here talking about the corn we hope you learned something if you have any questions or comments please put them in the comments below and we appreciate it when you hit that thumbs up button your comments and questions and thumbs up tell YouTube to show our videos to more people which we really appreciate we hope you'll subscribe to the channel and hit that Bell for notifications we'd like you to come back and see what else we got going on here bumblebee Junction but we appreciate your time thank you for coming out and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Bumblebee Junction

Views: 29,765

Rating: 4.9601593 out of 5

Keywords: sweet corn, growing sweet corn, recipe, sweet corn recipe, recipe for success, corn, sweet, homestead, homesteading, planting depth, planting, plant spacing, plant, spacing, weeding, how to fertilize, when to fertilize, how to plant, when to plant, insect spray, spray for insects, crop, crop damage, when sweet corn is ready, ready for harvest, harvest, tips and tricks, corn patch, corn plot, days to maturity, germination, fails, crop failure, cut worm, tassel, silk, ear, ears, picking, seed

Id: h2s8XasatMU

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018