The Busy Woman's Garden Book

by Ida D. Bennett

Corn is a gross feeder and requires a deep, mellow, fertile soil, well enriched with barnyard manure. Clover sod well manured and ploughed will give the maximum amount of corn, but any good soil if fertilized will produce good corn.

Corn is somewhat tender and should not be planted until the ground is warm, but in the small home garden where a small amount of seed is required a little risk may be run by planting early in May and replanting if an early frost catches the crop. It is not, as a general thing, the spring frost that does the most damage, especially with field corn, it is the late frost that catches the corn still in the milk that does the damage, so that anything that pushes the crop along to maturity before danger of fall frost is of moment. This is one reason why heavy fertilizing is so important,—it speeds up the maturing of the corn and gets it beyond the danger line in time.

Sweet corn may be planted in drills or in hills, but I prefer the hill method. Even in a small patch that can be worked but one way with a horse or cultivator—there is always a hoe to take care of the space between the hills.

The rows should be three feet apart and the corn in hills three feet apart, or if planted in rows make the rows four feet apart and the corn twelve inches apart. Drop several kernels in each hill and thin to three plants to a hill when the corn is up and danger of frost is passed. One pound of seed will plant a hundred hills or from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet of row. If hard frost threatens just as the corn is coming through the ground, throwing earth over it with a hoe will often afford sufficient protection to save it.

In a small garden patch it is not much work to stick a mark of some kind in the center of each hill and if this is done cultivation can commence at once and a hard crust be prevented from forming; this will hasten the germination of the seed and insure the elimination of weeds at the start.

There are many varieties of sweet corn advertised, each seedsman having his own favorite specialty, but there are really but two that one need take into consideration—the old, reliable Stowell's Evergreen and the new Bantam Evergreen—a cross between that exceptionally sweet corn, the Golden Bantam, and Stowell's Evergreen, and combining the great qualities of both parents, the delicious sweetness and tenderness and earliness of Bantam with the more generous size and more tender skin of the Evergreen. Plant these two varieties and have the best to be obtained in sweet corn. One planting of Evergreen will give big generous ears of late corn, while for succession the Bantam may be planted every two weeks up to July.

When the corn is a couple of feet high it will be well to go through the patch and remove all suckers or barren stalks so as to conserve all the food and moisture for the production of ears.

In addition to barnyard manure, wood ashes is an important fertilizer for corn, supplying the potash so essential to its growth; this may be put in the hill at the time the corn is planted or may be scattered about the plants after they are up and hoed into the soil; it should not be applied in connection with manure as it has a tendency to release the ammonia content of the manure, but should be applied independently. Droppings from the poultry house may be used in the growing of the corn crop, placing about a teacupful in a hill, but not in contact with the seed. Several barrels of dry droppings should be saved during the winter for just this extra fertilizing in the kitchen garden.[³]

Corn is very easily transplanted so that where there is a failure of the corn to germinate in some hills and an over supply in others, the extra plants may be lifted carefully with the spade or trowel and slipped into holes prepared for them where wanted. Last season I had an interesting experience transplanting an entire row of corn, over a foot high. A row of okra had been planted across the garden but failed to appear on schedule time and was finally given up and corn planted in its place; the corn came up and had made several inches of top when to my surprise the okra appeared. It was evident that the two robust plants could not occupy successfully the same ground and I did not wish to sacrifice either, so an equal number of hills were prepared in another part of the garden, fertilized with poultry droppings and ashes and the hills of corn, then over a foot high, lifted, one hill at a time, on a spade and carried and slipped into their holes, and not a plant seemed aware that anything had happened to it; certainly there was no check to the growth, but, by lifting on the spade with plenty of soil adhering, the roots were not disturbed in the least.