I agree with all that has been said. You could take your chances, find an earlier variety and even the notion one should watch the bees...Bees are tireless until nature waves that black veil upon them..in September here in the NE bees are out of their mind. They're dying. The female is the worker bee, the male fans the hive. It's a long life to them and they tell you when it's time to start shaking out the blankets. I wish you the best i really do. because a man who tries is a man who do's. Worst case scenario is it doesn't finish but whatever that grows returns to the ground as compost. I plamted my late corn June 26th or so...it's about 4 feet tall now, some smaller....I've got a short window myself but i'm gonna try to get those stalks taller with fish emulsion(2x a week). You've got to try got nothing to lose and plant some beans with the corn for nitrogen. Beans would overwhelm new corn though. I waited until my corn was 3 feet and change. Growing fast now in the heat. Best of luck.

Purple is indeed dominant over white, but in this case, I planted white corn and pollinated it with white corn. You can partially explain this with epistasis which roughly means that two genes are interacting with unexpected results. That is a very broad brush stroke that does not quite explain this situation. I suspect it is a result of Cherokee squaw having a biochemical pathway that produces the purple pigment but that it was turned off by a single gene in the white Cherokee Squaw seed I planted. The Silver King probably does not have the biochemical pathway for purple pigment but it does have the single gene that turns on the pathway. The result is that the crossbred seed are all 'turned on' for purple color. I can't yet prove the above, it will take a lot more time and crossing to determine for sure what is happening. A couple of generations of segregation and self-pollination will resolve it. DarJones

The books and all photos I have seen show 'Silver King' with entire leaves which sometimes have a few "notches", one might even say a few "teeth" but in no way are they divided or fringed or truly lobed. I finally got a reply from the mail order source and they confirm this. They believe I have the real thing and say that the mature leaves, which are entire, occur later in the season, but they also asked me to monitor this and report to them if the plants do not eventually resemble 'Silver King'. I have seen one photo of a 'Silver King' that appears to have these juvenile leaves which are lobed. but on top of them are the mature leaves which are entire, more or less spear-shaped (lanceolate). I am surprised I have found no one thus far on this forum who could address my question. Maybe it is such a common plant that most just pass by it?

I believe I remember reading about Dorothy's Johnson grass experiences (at least some of them) in her book. : ) I pull out or dig out all I can. The hand-pulling is really easy with any Johnson grass that has just recently sprouted from seed. With plants sprouting from rhizomes, I have to dig. Then, I crawl on my hands and knees along the rows of corn with my Fiskars garden scissors in my hands about once a week and cut off the Johnson grass as close to the ground as I can. The more you keep the topgrowth clipped back short, the more you weaken it since there aren't any (or many) leaves above ground conducting photosynthesis and sending energy to the plant roots. Johnson grass is and always has been my number one garden problem. I dig out all I can every year, and I rototill the remainder on purpose to break up the rhizomes into a million pieces in winter. If you leave them exposed on the surface of the ground, they can dehydrate and then freeze if the weather is cold enough. I will repeatedly rototill and rake out all the pieces of rhizomes I can find in winter. We are in our 15th year here and I still have Johnson grass issues in the big garden, but probably only about 10% of what I once had. Last Sunday I pulled out seedling Johnson grass from my rows of Silver Queen, Country Gentleman and Early Sunglow Corn. Then I dug out the plants that had come back from rhizomes. This is only our second year to grow corn in this area, and there's not much Johnson Grass at all now compared to last year. However, this is a sandy soil area and I can dig pretty deep and get out a lot of the rhizomes. In our big garden where the soil is mostly clay, it is more of a battle. If you rototilled your soil before planting the corn, you might have Johnson grass seedlings that sprouted from seed in the soil. It would take a while, but you could dig themout. If you rototilled or plowed and broke up existing Johnson Grass rhizomes into billions of smaller pieces, and then you didn't rake them out, then there isn't much you can do except cut them off to keep them short so they will weaken. It is easier to tell the corn from the Johnson grass once they are 6-8" tall. Before we moved here, I thought bermuda grass was the worst stuff on earth after battling to keep it out of garden beds in Fort Worth. After moving here, I quickly learned that bermuda grass is a lazy wimp compared to Johnson grass. Johnson grass is bermuda grass on steroids. Eventually the corn gets tall enough and casts enough shade that it will outcompete the Johnson grass but you can help ensure that by cutting back the Johnson grass. If you spaced your corn plants really widely apart, you can use a string trimmer to cut only the Johnson grass. You could use a cheap foam paintbrush to brush a grasskiller type herbicide onto the Johnson grass, but don't get it on the corn! Be careful and read the label carefully if you use any of the herbicides mentioned in the link that Scott has in his response. Some herbicides that work on Johnson grass in corn fields only work on popcorn or field corn and will damage or kill Johnson grass. If you had planted Roundup Ready corn (available only to commercial growers as far as I know), you could have sprayed the whole field with Round-up and the corn would have been fine. However, I am not recommending that...just saying that is how commercial growers often do it. Unfortunately, the heavy use of RR corn varieties now has given us Johnson grass in some nations and in some states (including Arkansas) that now is tolerant of glyphosate type herbicides. If you didn't have a crop in the field, regular mowing will get rid of the Johnson grass (same mechanism as allowing goats to graze it---having the top growth removed repeatedly weakens it) but the issue is that you do have a crop in the field. Johnson grass is probably the #1 reason gardeners in my county give up gardening. You see it every year. They decide to have a garden. They plow up the ground or rototill it and immediately plant. They ignore those little grass plants that start sprouting. By June, those little sprouts of Johnson Grass are taller than the rest of the garden, including being taller than the corn and taller than the tomato plants. The gardeners try to pull out the grass and discovers it has rhizomes that run for feet and that are as big around as their index finger. They abandon the garden before the Fourth of July and let the Johnson grass win. They do this for multiple years before deciding that gardening isn't fun. Don't let this happen to you. When a gardener abandons a garden full of Johnson grass, it grows until it sets seed, and then you have to deal with a ton more Johnson Grass next year. With consistent effort, you can get rid of it. Don't let it defeat you. On the other hand, if you are in a rural or semi-rural area where there likely is a raccoon population, and if your garden isn't fenced, just relax. Johnson grass won't be a problem, but the coons will be. They will harvest the corn for you about 3-5 days before it is ready for you to harvest it, and they'll tear up all the cornstalks for you, leaving only the Johnson grass, growing happily and quite healthy. At that point, having lost the corn crop to the coons, you can spray the Johnson grass with a herbicide if you wish, and then plant corn in mid-summer for a fall harvest. Dawn