You Can Grow Lots of Sweet Corn in Raised Beds

[Music] i'm courtney we're a family of five trying to grow as much of our own food as we can and we raise chickens our kids wanted to name our little backyard farm so we did it's called heart pine farms [Music] a really warm evening in july and we're hoping for some rain but the storms have been so isolated lately that we're just kind of keeping our fingers crossed if you like sweet corn if you like sweet corn and you prefer to eat organically grown sweet corn yeah it's raining yay you probably know that it's really expensive to buy at the store and it's really hard to find at the store also so you might be interested in knowing that it's really easy to grow organic sweet corn at home you can grow lots of sweet corn and raised beds at home and there are lots of different varieties of organic corn that you can grow and the flavor of homebound corn is phenomenal you can control when you eat it after you harvest which promotes the best flavor sugars break down with time so it's best within 24 hours or actually as soon as you can eat it after you harvest it so here are some things that we do to successfully grow corn which we're hoping will help give you some tips to figure out what worked for you growing [Music] so this is our second planting of corn three beds we had three beds that we planted in the spring which we harvested already so there's one bed and then we have two other beds right here with a trellis in the middle where we grow cucumbers at the same time but we have three beds and we grow two different types of corn not all in the same bed if we have different types of corn growing we separate them in different beds but we grow two different kinds of corn they're both earlier varieties that are mature within 70 to 74 days so there are a few things we do to help ensure the success of our corn and the first thing is the soil we plant winter cover crops we plant a soil building mix that adds both biomass and helps fix nitrogen since corn the plants are are heavy feeders and they require lots of nitrogen so that helps we turn the cover crops under in the spring about four to six weeks before we're planning on planting the corn and then right before we plant we add compost to our soil [Music] we buy high quality organic seed that has a really good germination rate and we stick with varieties that both taste really good to us and that we've also had luck growing here's what we do when we plant our corn seeds so we plant and blocks each block being in a bed we plant four rows in each four by eight bed and we plant the seeds eight inches apart since corn is mostly wind pollinated planting in blocks helps with pollination success pests are inevitable when you're growing organically we don't like to use pesticides even organic ones because we don't want to harm beneficial insects beneficial insects will even eat pests so we like to shoot for a healthy balance when we see insects like japanese beetles on our corn we try to remove as many of them as we can by hand especially when the silks first emerge corn is pollinated within three to five days after silk emerges so if the japanese beetles eat the silk after that the ear corn will still develop just fine because it was successfully pollinated before the beetles got to it the other thing we do when we plant our corn seeds is we put bird netting over the beds we had a big problem with brown thrashers eating our corn seedlings this year and they went right in and tore the little one-inch tall seedlings out and ate the sprouting corn underneath so we lost most of our our corn so we had to replant the other thing we do when the corn gets tall enough is that we put stakes on the ends of the beds and with string we just tie the corn up in between the rows like this so another thing that we've had happen in the past is you know a random thunderstorm popping up and then we lose all of our corn because it tips over [Music] [Music] we do this with soaker hoses it helps the soil remain moist but not too soggy because the soil can never really dry out corn is relatively shallow rooting so it requires water very consistently [Music] fertilizing since we keep our soil really healthy with cover crops and compost we're finding that we really don't need to fertilize very much when the corn is about a foot tall we add fish emulsion we just side dress the corn with it and that's about it and our corn has done really really well each each raised bed yields about 30 to 40 years with the varieties that we grow the varieties that we grow are mirage sweet corn it's a white really really sweet corn and this right here is who gets kissed it's a bi-colored corn and generally we get one to two ears per plant so we eat as much fresh corn on the cob as we can in the summertime and then we can the rest we pressure can the rest so that we can enjoy it as side dishes with our meals through the winter time it helps us save time and money to have healthy sides put away like that oh my god all right thank you [Music] [Applause] yes [Music] you

Channel: Cortney Grows Food

Views: 35,968

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Id: 4rPxdCyvNog

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022