I Tried Growing Corn in a Raised Garden Bed

great lakes prepping here as i've mentioned on this channel before most of my vegetable gardening takes place in raised garden beds in the spring of 2021 i decided i wanted to try growing sweet corn in one of these beds so now here we are approaching the spring of 2022 and i decided to put together this video from the periodic photos and videos i shot throughout last season and just sort of share my experience and impressions from having grown a small crop of corn in a raised garden bed last year [Music] while it's generally said that corn should be grown in multiple rows for a successful crop i have seen lots of people grow it in relatively small spaces such as raised garden beds the bed i wanted to try this in is three foot by eight foot which really only gives me room for two rows of corn still i wanted to give it a try and see how viable it was so after preparing my soil with compost and organic fertilizer i got to planting i did the best i could to space my seeds according to the packet's instructions but due to the size of my raised bed the space between my two rows was a bit narrower than what is recommended it only took about five days before i started to see some green sprouting out of the soil and the stalks just kept growing pretty quickly from there once the stalks got a few inches tall and were pretty sturdy i added wood chips to the bed i do this for both weed control and to help the soil retain moisture very little weeding is needed after the wood chips go down and i seem to be able to use much less water throughout the year than i used to before i started using wood chips now one of the biggest problems i hear from people who grow small crops of corn is that the stalks are very prone to being blown over or damaged by the wind when you have an entire field of corn all of the surrounding stalks tend to serve as a wind barrier and support system for every other stock but with just a dozen or so plants the wind could really knock them around any which way so as soon as the stalks were tall enough to risk bending or breaking i added several garden stakes and a series of strings going in between the stakes to help support the cornstalks this ended up being sort of clumsy and messy looking but it did the trick i only had one stalk get knocked over by the wind and it was at the end of the season after the ears had already been picked if i did this again i probably wouldn't do the stakes and strings the way i did it this time but rather individual longer steaks for each cornstalk i'd get some of those long bamboo steaks maybe and loosely tie each stalk to one of them the other big reason that it's recommended to plant corn in several rows or clusters is because they cross pollinate one another basically the tassel that grows from the top of the stalks must pollinate each individual corn cob via the silky strings that form on each cob before a kernel of corn ever grows between wind gravity and insects a lot of corn stalks can pollinate a lot of other corn stalks now corn can be manually pollinated and even though i saw a lot of bee activity around the tassels of these corn stalks i decided to do this anyway just to be on the safe side it wasn't a ton of work considering the small number of corn plants i'm dealing with here basically i just snip off one segment of a plant's tassel and rub it around on the silks of each cob obviously this wouldn't be a viable solution for say a 10 acre crop containing thousands of corn stalks but for my handful of stocks it was worth the five minutes just to be sure after all without that pollination i simply won't have cobs full of kernels most corn stalks will grow two or three cobs of corn sometimes more sometimes less but usually two or three for my corn plants i definitely averaged two per stock but there was a big variance between cob size from plant to plant i'd say that about half of my corn stalks produced big fat beautiful cobs of corn while the other half produced thin wimpy sometimes even useless cobs and a couple of the plants produced one awesome cob and one lame cob i don't really know why this happens and i wonder if it's just par for the course when doing organic gardening with non-gmo corn in any case the cobs that turned out good turned out really good it was without a doubt some of the tastiest corn i've ever had i've certainly had bigger cobs from the grocery store or farmer's market but this corn was absolutely delicious one thing i needed to learn about was how to tell when a cob is ready to get picked first i look for when the silk turns quite brown in color from there i used the fingernail test to determine the ideal time to harvest basically this involves peeling back a bit of the husk and pressing a fingernail into one kernel if a little bit of liquid comes out and it's quite milky looking it's time to pick if the liquid is clear it's probably too early and if there's no liquid at all it's either too late or the corn just isn't very good for whatever reason so after having planted grown harvested and eaten my very own corn here are some of my main takeaways one you can definitely plant just two rows of corn in a raised garden bed two it's very satisfying to watch a tiny kernel turn into a monstrous six foot tall corn stalk three it's even more satisfying to snap a cob off that stalk shuck it cook it up and eat it 4. it was kind of disappointing that around half of the stalks didn't produce corn that was particularly awesome 5. the cobs became ready to harvest at different times spanning two or four weeks this is fine for just me to grab a cob here and there and have it for dinner but i like to grow vegetables for the purpose of then preserving and storing to use throughout the year i would need to grow way more corn to make this even close to worthwhile for my food storage efforts to conclude i really enjoyed growing this corn and learning all i did about the process but i'm not sure i'll do it again at this small a scale i love having fresh corn but i may hold off i'm growing it again until i can plant a larger crop so that's about it just a sort of quick video to share my experience growing corn in a raised bed for the first time don't forget to like and subscribe and stay up to date on all our latest stuff including future gardening videos thanks for watching and until next time this is great lakes prepping

Channel: Great Lakes Country

Views: 20,417

Keywords: growing corn garden beds, corn raised garden beds, can i grow corn in raised beds, corn backyard garden, organic gardening corn, when to harvest corn, how to plant corn

Id: 6jGwF7am3B8

Length: 7min 15sec (435 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022