Pegsol,

We discussed saving corn seed a few weeks ago. I'll find that thread and link it below for you. Just click on the link and you can read the previous thread.

Before you ask a question, you can enter a word or phrase in the search box and search either just this forum or all of Garden Web to find previous discussions on that topic. For a while, the search feature wasn't working, but they seem to have fixed it and it is working again.

George raises field corn and grain so I think he'd be the best person to answer your question, but he hasn't been on the forum much this week and may not be on it much for the next few days. He's rather tied up right now getting ready for a big family celebration. After you read the linked thread, if you have other questions, feel free to come back and ask them and we'll do our best to answer them.

I do think it would take a great amount of space to raise enough to feed your animals, but even if you could only raise part of the amount they need in any given year, that would be a positive thing.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Previous Thread on Saving Corn Seed

There's an old book, out of print forever, that just got updated and republished. I pre-ordered it at Amazon and it just recently shipped out. Anyway, it covers the topic and it's called "Small-Scale Grain Raising, Second Edition: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers" by Gene Logsdon. I'll link it below for you.

Can't wait to read mine!

Here is a link that might be useful: small scale grains

Howdy!

Dawn is right. It's getting hard for me to drop in. But I will when I can.

Pegsol, you'd be amazed how much you can grow from a little handful of seed. But one really would need a couple acres of corn to raise enough to feed a good number of poultry and other livestock. Still, anything is a help. We grow probably 40 square feet of dent corn every year. So far, I can't bring myself to feed it to the critters. We eat it all in cornmeal and grits.

George

Sorry Okiedawn, i have dial up and did search topic but it was other site. I am grateful for advice you and George gave awhile back on seeds to purchase.I bought most seeds you'all recommended and they are doing well (except the storm yesterday blew my grennhouse over and dumped all my seedlings into a pile of rubble! I do have 40 acres to work with so space is no problem. Macmex, that book sounds just perfect and I will order one. Thanxs to you all.

Pegsol,

It is not big deal. I just wanted you to know the search feature was available if you weren't already aware of it. I know it is harder to do a search with dial-up. We used to have dial up and it was so slow that the search feature wasn't very useful.

I am so sorry to hear about your greenhouse and seedlings. Were you able to salvage anything or was it just a big mess? Is the greenhouse salvageable or did the wind shred it? You know, it if wasn't for the weather here, gardening would be a cinch.

Hope you are able to make a swift recovery from the loss of the seedlings.

If your whole 40 acres is plowable/plantable, you should be able to grow a lot of your own animal feed and people food too. : ) With corn, though, if you have a lot of raccoons, you'll have to fight them for every ear so that could be a problem. (An electric fence like you use for cattle, or even the type used for dogs, will keep coons out of the corn most of the time.)

Good luck,

Dawn

Okiedawn, my dial up is painful!It is soooo slow!The geenhouse is ok. I lost my biggest tomato plant, some tomato seedlings, swiss chard, etc. Nothing I don't have more of. My biggest concerns are for my eggplant seedlings which all got dumped over. I hope they can recover. About 20 acres of land is pasture. Yes, those raccoons ate all but approx. 2 dozen ears out of 1000 plants last season! I talked to a man at the feed store who said he planted five acres of corn last season and the racoons ate a whole acre!I cannot thank you enough for your help with variety selections. Apparently you have a melon fetish. Ha Ha. Somehow I ended up with 13 kinds of melons. So excited to see my first heirloom garden come into production. Thank you.

Pegsol,

The raccoons always try to get my corn about 2 or 3 days before it is ready to pick. And, they don't just bother us home gardeners.

A couple or years ago we had a really severe drought--and by the spring of 2006, we were entering our second summer of a long drought. A local farmer planted a huge amount of corn for him, his family and his friends. I don't know how far back his rows went, but they ran about a half-mile along the road. His brother-in-law told me that the raccoons got all but 8 or 10 ears out of that big corn patch.

That same year, we trapped and removed 2 or 3 raccoons and they still got all our corn. A friend of a friend of ours who lives significantly closer than us to the Red River had a really severe raccoon problem. He trapped and got rid of (no one would say how, but I don't think he released them elsewhere--I think he shot them) 18 raccoons in 18 nights and they still got all his corn too!

One thing that might help is to plant a "border" of winter squash or pumpkins around all 4 sides of the corn patch, and let the pumpkins and squash roam into the corn patch too. The coons don't like the big, coarse leaves and often will leave the corn away. That mostly worked for me last year and I got about 75% of the corn and the raccoons got the rest. (We got so much corn that we still have about a dozen bags of frozen ears in the deep freeze.) The pumpkins don't always work though. An electric fence always works.

Some people who grow a relatively small amount of corn wait until the corn has pollinated and has fully formed ears, and then they wrap the ears in strapping tape run lengthwise, but that's too much work for me.

I'm glad the greenhouse is OK. If your biggest tomato plant snapped in half, it still may regrow from the roots. And, if you had taken the top, trimmed off the jagged broken piece, and stuck the rest in a glass or jar of water, it would have grown enough roots in 7-10 days and then you could have planted it in the ground or in a container. You also can root a "cutting" in soil, but I like rooting them in water so I can see the roots grow and know when it has "enough" to plant into the ground.

Right now, I am rooting a "Brandy Boy" that the wind snapped off last week. It has been in the water a week and has enough roots that I can plant it today. Since 12" of rain fell here on Tuesday and more is expected this weekend, I think this Brandy Boy is going to go into a large container. I have two other Brandy Boy plants in the ground, and two back-up plants on the screened-in back porch, but I didn't want to lose that one--you can never have too many Brandy Boys.

As long as the eggplant seedlings didn't snap in half, they'll probably recover. Eggplant is really tough. My eggplants kept producing one droughty summer long after I stopped watering the garden. No rain was falling and they still produced until a frost got them in November. I think I had stopped watering in July and they had virtually no rain for weeks and weeks and weeks.

I do have a melon fetish because they are all so good and the flavors are marvelous. Think of heirloom tomatoes and heirloom melons as "fine wines". There are so many "vintages"----why restrict yourself to one or two? Why not have a whole smorgasboard of wonderful varieties? Sometimes I think I am going overboard with the melons, but then I'll have a "Collective Farm Woman" one day and then a different one like "Nutmeg" the next day, and it makes every meal an adventure.

I'm excited about your first heirloom garden too and hope that it does well for you.

Dawn

If you have land, and if you happen to have livestock, you might consider getting a livestock guard dog. We can't speak too highly of ours, a Great Pyrenees. I have a friend who lives down by the Illinois River. He was losing poultry at an alarming rate. One day I found him a Great Pyrenees in need of a home. He took it. I saw him a week later and he was raving about it. He said, "In one week that dawg killed 15 coon and a bobcat! I gotta get me another one of these!"

Guardian, our Pyrenees considers skunks and coon to be major intruders. He kills them "on contact." This keeps them pretty much on the other side of the road. I guess they know when they are not welcome.

If grow corn for your animals you might consider a dent/non-sweet variety. Coon are a lot less inclined to bother it. I've never had anything except squirrels bother non-sweet corn.

George

George,

Our friends up the road who have goats just got two new Great Pyrenees pups a couple of months ago. Those two dogs stay with those goats 24/7 and are very protective of them.

These folks had another Great Pyrenees for several years, but he wasn't really theirs and eventually he went to live with his real family. They've wanted/needed another Great Pyrenees every since.

And those Great Pyrenees are absolutely the cutest puppies in the world, too!

Our friends' goats are expecting babies in June or July. I thought they were through adding to their flock once the human kids graduated from high school and weren't in FFA anymore, but they've been missing having animal kids around.

I hope all your goats and kids (animal and human) are doing well.

I'm tempted to plant some dent corn just for the joy of NOT having the coons get it. : )

Dawn