Corn Pollination We're dealing with sweet corn, my favorite vegetable to grow and eat fresh. First off, sweet corn is bred for flavor, while field corn is bred for it's hearty traits. So sweet corn is slower to germinate in colder soils, slower to grow without supplemental Nitrogen, and much more susceptible to stress and weather damage. My first sweet corn this year was on March 25th, I took a chance with the super warm march we had. I planted 3 short rows 15 feet long about 30 inches apart, and my pollination was ok. I had about 20 plants or so there. The exceptionally warm march turned into a cold and moderate April, with two frosts once my corn emerged. A couple of the plants in my 3 rows frosted off, but they came back up, as the growing point was still below the soil. I wound up with 5 or 6 good ears out of that whole stand, the rest didn't pollinate at all. It was a good experiment to see how well frost damage corn would do, and come back after. I could have covered it, but I had many more rows to plant and I was curious to see first hand what would happen. Reading about it is never quite as good as real experience. As the tassels emerge and shed their pollen, some of the pollen drifts down onto the silks, pollinating the ear. Once the tassel sheds the pollen, it is only viable for 1-2 hours. The tassel takes a few days to shed all of the pollen, So you do have a window of a couple of days. Now, Taking the above into account, You want all the plants to pollinate together, so that you have the most pollen shed at the same time, and all of the silks will get pollen on them. The first thing you can do to maximize this is to have all of the corn plants grow together, i.e, be the same height and stage of development, throughout the first 60 days of growth. Watch your weather reports, and wait to plant until conditions will be warmer for a good 2 weeks. Corn takes, on average, 10-15 days to emerge from planting. Be a little picky with your row furrow, make sure the planting depth is uniform and the same texture. If you want the BEST stand, cover each row with clear plastic, help the soil warm even more, and help prevent temperature loss overnight. That is the ideal situation. Just be sure to remove the plastic after emergence, or they will cook under the plastic. After the corn has emerged, the single most important thing you can do to help stand uniformity is to apply Nitrogen early, and spread the fertilizing of Nitrogen across 3 or 4 different applications. Two weeks after it has emerged, dabble it with Nitrogen (I go down to the elevator that my grandfather hauls his grain to, and I buy some Aqueous Ammonia, or 35% N), you can go to any farm and home (Big R, farm supply store) and look for pasture/lawn fertilizer, it comes in 25-0-0 in a 3 gallon jug. If you compost or add amendments in the fall you shouldn't need to add any phosphorous or potassium, but fall applications of Nitrogen will be gone by the time spring rolls around. Fall soil tests will let you know where you stand on you P and K numbers, as well as pH, all important to vegetable plant growth. Excess P and K will stick around until plants use it up, Nitrogen is specifically targeted by nitrobacter which will eat the nitrogen and volatilize it, letting it escape into the atmosphere. The nitrobacter are important in turning nitrogen in our fertilizer into a form that plants can readily use, but there is a small window, once the soils are warmer than 50 degrees, the bacteria do their job all too well. Remember, we are dealing with a plant that has been selectively bred by humans since the time of Christ, turning it from Mexican maize into the single ear plant we see now. It needs a lot of nitrogen to deliver the high powered performance that humans demand out of it. Pollination can be maximized by picking the right planting date, having a uniform seed bed, watering well after planting, and applying supplemental N to the plants after 2 weeks, and giving it 2 or 3 more applications of N in 2 week intervals after that. Nitrogen will volatilize on the surface, so the best way to fertilize is to dig a small trench right next to your row, shallow enough not to disturb the roots, dribble in a thin line of 25-0-0, and then cover it up so that it will bond with the soil. If the stand is staggered, with some plants taller than others and different plants at different stages of growth at the same time, you will see staggered tassel and silk emergence down the road when it comes time to pollinate and fill the ears. And if, in the end, we have a year like this, where you have such an extreme drought, so little water on the plants, you may wind up with nothing. Sweet corn lacks the drought tolerance that has been bred into the field corn varieties, and this year I had to do this every 5 days or so, hauling water from town: ~Chris

I just inspected mine a few days ago. Like you, I was ready to yank them. It seems they were planted ages ago. But - I was giving them the benefit of the doubt - mainly because we have had lots of "no sun" weather, and most warm weather vegetable plants aren't happy without sun at this time of year. Anyway, when I pulled a plant - I found 2 large ones and 2 smaller. Now I'm seriously thinking of using them as a ground cover in my yard. If - as one poster above maintains - they are a "poor soil" item - that may be one of the "winners" I'm looking for. We are in the midst of a water shortage, presently limited to 3 days per week schedule. This has prompted a lot of re-thinking on the part of some backyard gardeners, who are now converting all those lovely ornamentals to something less thirsty, so as to be able to concentrate our precious water on the plants we love the most - edibles! Sooo - don't pull those taters just yet. Just my 2 c's. Bejay

Hi bosewichte, Well, of course, it's hard to tell what may have caused your problems by just reading your post. Basically, it sounds like you did everything about right. There are a few things that I do wonder about however; they may or may not be the cause of the problems. First of all, I think you should get a thermostat for your heat mat. Without it, you really don't know what the temperature of the growing media is. Usually, you don't want the temperature to go over about 75 or 76 degrees. Then, you mentioned filling and using plastic dixie cups. Actually, they're pretty deep for seed germination. To prevent the growing media from staying too wet, shallower containers probably would have been better. In any case, you want the media to be moist and not wet. When the seeds germinate, their roots will need oxygen, which can be driven out by too much water. Also, watering seeds from the top can easily cause the seeds to be buried too deep. Most folks agree that gentle bottom watering is the best. If the growing media is moist (not wet) before you put it into the germination containers, and you use the plastic domes, you probably would not need to add any more water until after the seeds have germinated. My guess is that your seeds ended up too deep and/or the growing media was too wet. You should see slight condensation on the underside of the dome, but if water runs down the sides it's too wet. Hope this is helpful and good luck in the future with your seed germinating. Art

The cardboard didn't help with maintaining a moist root area, but isn't totally responsible gor what happened, either. It's very tempting to put down something like cardboard, newspapers or landscape fabric to suppress weeds, but they really do more harm then good. Weeds grow through them and root into them and become harder to deal with in the long run. It would be best to remove the cardboard, bite the proverbial bullet and pull the weeds by hand. Once the area is reasonably weed free, it's not that big a chore to keep it that way. Declined really is a better description than died. The branches showing the most extreme drooping will not revive, but the stems themselves should be fine. Cut them back to an area showing green cambium and they should put forth new growth. There is still ample time for lots of regrowth before fall. There are some root diseases which can cause this kind of rapid collapse, but I am reasonably confident that you will find very dry root balls. Should they prove to be nicely moist, you are then dealing with a more serious condition for which there is really no cure. Fingers crossed.