Hooray for the successful harvest!
We're overrun by the raccoons too this year.

We had a good potato harvest too, and a pretty good early bean havest in June, but not much from the beans the last 2 weeks, so I picked the remaining beans last night and yanked out the plants and threw them on the compost pile.

In a few days I'll probably plant some sort of southern peas for fall in the now-vacated bean bed. At least the southern peas will have a chance of producing something since they're so heat-tolearant and can get by on minimal watering.

All the spring lima bean and southern pea plants are blooming now, so at least they'll fill in the bean gap for now, assuming it isn't so hot that their blossoms drop. The thermometer on the east-facing front porch is showing 104 right now. I usually get a great harvest from these crops, but they aren't normally subjected to such high heat so early in the summer.

Everything in our garden that prefers milder temps is just roasting and is 'done'. However, the true heat-lovers are hanging in there.

I don't know if my late corn will set ears. It has tasseled but not silked and is very stunted even though I've watered it as well as I could.

Did your daughter eat a lot of peppers in the past? I'd hate to develop an allergy to something I enjoy as much as I enjoy peppers.

My daughter loved green and banana peppers as a child. Would pick them in the garden and snack like some kids eat apples. She was grown and married before she developed an allergy. Of course, I wonder if it's really the peppers she is reacting to or something sprayed on grocery store peppers. She's afraid to check that out as she swells so badly that her throat closes off.

My southern peas are slow this year, but are still out there and starting to bloom. I planted some pintos and shelled them out, but probably won't again.

I'm trying to decide whether to water the pole beans that I planted a month ago where the peas came out. They were eaten back pretty heavily by the deer. Dad has a nice batch just starting to bloom so I may pass and share his. Which he doesn't mind because I share so much of my stuff with him.

Bad corn harvest for us this year even though they were growing good with well formed ear-heads before storm hit them. Only very bad thing is that all most all cobs were attached by ear worms and damaged half of the cob. I just shredded all the plants with cobs and used then as mulch in Okra and Beans beds. Baby corn corn is growing and no sign of cobs yet.

Last week I bought from WM selling @ 20c each.. I am just wonder is it worth to grow corn in small home gardens? Local markets also sells at very cheaper when our corn are ready to harvest. If nothing was effected my corn, I might have harvest about 30 good cobs which is basically worth of $6 @ 2cents per cob at current WM price. I am sure there might be some compromise in taste? any thoughts on this?

-Chandra

To me, the compromise is in freshness and also I'd rather have corn grown organically, and none of the stores near me carry organic corn, just corn raised conventionally

If I had a smallish home garden, I might not find it worthwhile to grow corn. This year we had almost no corn earworms...I think I had one in the first 80 ears we harvested.

If you like the taste of the grocery store corn found in stores near you, then why not buy it? Or, check at the Farmer's Market near you for Oklahoma-grown corn. It would be fresher than corn brought in from someplace else. The average food in grocery stores in this country travels 1500 miles from the original producer to the point of sale.

Also, watch the signs when you're in Wal-Mart. Our Wal-Mart posts "locally grown" signs by any produce they sell that was sourced locally. Sometimes they post a sign saying where the so-called locally-grown produce came from. I don't always agree with them that it is 'local' but it still generally isn't from someplace as far as 1500 miles away.

One of the advantages of growing your own corn is that you can put the pot of water on the stove to boil, walk out and harvest the corn, and cook it within a few minutes. It doesn't get any more fresh or more local than that. However, I think you should use your garden in the way that makes the most sense to you, and if growing your own corn doesn't make sense to you and you'd rather use that space for something else, then why not do so?

Dawn

Chandra,
I go the middle ground on corn. Because of the large number of raccoons on my creek I know I can never successfully grow corn. But nothing beats REALLY fresh corn, and you can't get that in the grocery store.

Until last year, I bought all my corn at Redbud Farms. I would call and add my name to "the list" in March. Around the July 4th weekend, the owner would call and tell us the trucks were headed to the fields to harvest. I'd be there waiting when the trucks can back in. From the time I got the phone call to the time I had my corn in the freezer was less than two hours. That's fresh. A couple of times I left fresh ears in the fridge. Even with just a day, i could tell the difference in taste. Sadly, the owners of Redbud Farms retired two years ago.

Now I go to a local corn farm. I'm not crazy about the way they run their business, but the corn is good. Specifically, I don't like having to stand in line in the heat. (Redbud would only call as many people as the harvest truck could provide for so I never had to stand in line.) So for me, on corn, it's not the price, it's the flavor. If price is the main concern, buy frozen because the producers pack it almost as quickly as I can.

Seedmama

I take the opposite approach and let someone else grow it for me. I don't have enough room in my garden for a large corn crop and a small one just doesn't seem worthwhile to me. We get ours from a friend about four miles from us, and my DH usually picks it out of the field. At some point I hope to have another place to grow potatoes outside my main garden also. It just seems like corn and potatoes should be field crops to me and home gardens rarely have that kind of room.

We are fortunate to have room for corn. In a good year, we harvest 600+ ears from our 15 fifty foot rows. This year is not a good year and the first picking only gave us 170 ears and not all were well filled out. I picked them by 7:30 and by noon they were all blanched and in the freezer. And this year we blanched them outdoors on the gas grill, which kept the kitchen cool. We're hoping the second batch will do better, but it's a race against the coons. Tonight there is a radio blaring a rock station out over the patch, but the cicados are so loud that even turned on full volume, it doesn't seem loud enough to me.

The taste of homegrown potatoes is so dear to us that even in a backyard garden I would make room for them. We planted 3 50 ft rows and got 170 lbs, 150 of which we dug last weekend. Even if I couldn't raise enough to store long term, I would raise "new potatoes" and eat them for two or three months every year. Of course I know not everyone has the space, but if I had a suburban lot the entire back yard would be vegetable garden and orchard of dwarf fruit trees.

Can you tell me what is the purpose of blancing corn before freezing?

Thanks

Em

Can you tell me what is the purpose of blancing corn before freezing?

Thanks

Em

Dorothy, I like the home grown potatoes as new potatoes also, but I need a better way to grow them. The ones I have planted have done OK but I need a better plan. I have taken my entire backyard as a garden but I always seem to fill it up. My garden is on the west side of the house and I have other buildings close, so sunshine also becomes an issue for me. This year the shade is good, but not every year.

I have a large side yard, but it isn't suitable for a garden. The front part is shade, the center (away from the house) is a septic leaching field. There is one area where I sometimes use containers but it is too close to the lines to plant in the ground. That only leaves one other sunny spot and I am guarding it carefully as a future greenhouse site, so I guess I'm my own worst enemy on that one. We only have two lots and have 9 very large trees, so we have lots of shade. If I lived where my son lives, I would probably plant 20 acres, then stay up all night to fight the deer out of it. LOL

My garden this year is probably larger than I need because I haven't kept up with it. It normally looks somewhat controlled, but not this year. I have grass and weeds everywhere. It looks very neglected, but it is just too hot to work out there. As much as I love to garden, a tomato is not worth a heat stroke.

If I lived on a large property, I would certainly plant dent corn for grinding, and lots of potatoes, or at least as many as I could eat before they ruined, and the same with onions. I think carrots would be a good addition also, but if I depended on my carrot crop to feed me, I would quickly starve to death. I am carrot challenged. I would also try to improve my sweet potato growing skills.

I am trying to add a few permanent things to my landscape but some of them are still growing in containers this year and I plan to put in the ground when they are a little stronger plant, be a few are already in the ground. I have a couple of blueberry vines, thornless blackberries, raspberries, horse radish, Jesuleum Artichokes, asparagus, strawberries, and a couple of trial plantings of rhubard and ginger. I don't know if I will ever find a way to grow rhubarb here. I made it into the 2nd summer on the last try, then it fried.

I have lived in this part of the State for 10 years and EVERYTHING is different from southern Oklahoma, so I am just learning as I go. I started out with a full-time job and a small garden, but now that I am home all of the time, the garden has grown every year. Every hot summer, I remind myself how old I am, then Spring comes around and I feel energetic and young and plant too much again. LOL

I live in a rather congested lake community and people feed the squirrels, in addition to having black walnut trees available, there are plenty of food sources to keep them going, so fruit trees are just about a waste of time for me. I wish I was wealthy enough to own a fruit house.

I am happy with where I live and enjoy living here, but it does have limitations. Of course, I have lived all over the world and nowhere is perfect in every way so I just learn to work with what I have.

Em,

The purpose of blanching any vegetable before freezing it is to deactivate enzymes that would cause negative changes in color, flavor, texture and overall quality. Essentially, if you don't blanch, you won't be impressed with the quality of your veggies when you thaw them out and cook them.

For the 'official' word on blanching from the experts, I've linked the blanching page from the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The NCHFP is the offical government organization that establishes and oversees proven-safe food preservation techniques.

One of the most important things about blanching is to do it for precisely the correct amount of time recomended for each different kind of vegetable.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP: Blanching Vegetables

Here is what is probably a really dumb question, but I'll ask it anyway. My grandson's wife wants to know if she can still put in corn and hope to harvest any of it this year?
Personally, I wouldn't bother, and particularly in the tiny space she has available, when we can buy it direct from farmers on the roadside at 10 ears for a dollar, but she wanted me to ask.

Pat

Dawn;
What do raccoons get into? We have a couple of big guys that stroll into the yard at night. (yikes)

Pat, Most years you can get a good crop from fall corn if (a) you can water it enough in August to get it established and (b) it matures before frost gets it. Usually we are frost free until late Oct. or early Nov., but here at our house we have had a killing freeze as early as Sept. 30th, though only about once a decade.

I've linked an older thread with a sequential planting calendar for now through fall. The earlier date in the date range is for more northern parts of the state and the later date is for more southern parts of the state. As you can see, it is time now to plant fall corn.

ChickenCoupe, Well, raccoons get into virtually everything. Let me give you a few examples:

They climb the trees and pull down the hummingbird feeders, unscrew the bottoms and drink the nectar. They toss the feeder parts into the shrubs and you have to search for them, find them, wash them, put the feeders back together again and refill them. Then, if you forget to bring in the feeders at night, they'll do it all over again.

They also climb the trees and pull down all regular bird feedes and empty them of seed.

They get into the chicken coop if your husband forgets and leaves the door open. Then they'll kill your chickens and your favorite rooster and leave feathers and dead body parts scattered all over.

If they can manage to find a way into your fenced chicken run, they'll pour out the chicken feed from the feeders and eat it and will dirty the water in the waterers.

They get into the chicken coop if the door is open during the evening because the free-ranging chickens haven't put themselves up yet and they steal your eggs right out of the nests. (So do skunks and snakes.)

They love to harvest your corn for you. Of course, since they're doing the work and harvesting it, they eat it. They don't even wait for it to be ripe. Heck, this year, they starting harvesting ears before the ears were completely pollinated/fertilized. The tear into the ears and nibble them. If the ear is not sufficiently ripe, the toss it on the ground, and tear up another ear. Sometimes you come outside in the morning and have 10 or 20 not-yet-ripe ears chewed and then thrown on the ground. Obviously since they harvest unripe corn and we cannot harvest it until it is ripe, guess how much corn you get once the coons arrive in full force? Practically none.

They'll harvest and eat tomatoes, melons, plums, peaches and strawberries.

If you have tiny chicks in a brooder cage and they can reach the brooder, they'll pull the legs off the chicks and eat the legs. Of course, you're left with the corpses of tiny dead legless chicks because they can't pull them through the 1/4" hardware cloth of the brooder cage.

If you have barn kittens in an open building, they'll kill and eat them. Friends of ours lost two mama cats and their litters to the raccoons a few years ago. Other friends lost their barn cats and kittens last year and also the year before that.

If you grow tomato plants or pepper plants in pots on your patio, you have to have cages and or deer netting wrapped securely around the entire plant in such a manner that the coons cannot put the netting up or down or off the plant ir they'll strip the sweet bell peppers and tomatoes off your container plants.

If you have a lily pond, they'll get into it and get your fish and tear up your water lilies in their eagerness to get your fish.

You may think you have two coons but I suspect you have more. We have killed 11 coons this summer, and yet, if I walk out into the yard any time between 9 p.m. and sunrise, I'll likely to see 2 or 3 or 4 at any given moment in time. We do everything we can to protect our animals and plants from them, but all that works for us is shooting them. My DH and DS have started asking me "Where are they coming from? How many more can there be?" I think the answer for us is they are coming from drought-plagued, drier parts of Texas and western OK because we've never had as many before as we have this year.

One of our neighbors lives closer to the river than we do so he has even worse raccoon issues than we do. He was determined to keep the raccoons from getting his corn in 2006, which was the second half of the 2005-2006 drought. I think that year he had 4 rows of 100' each. He put out a live trap before his corn was ripe and started catching one coon in the cage every night. He shot each one. (This is important, because otherwise you might think it is the same raccoon coming back night after night.) For eighteen nights in a row he caught and shoot a coon. How much corn did he get that year? None. Nada. Zilch. The raccoons got every ear.

Sometimes I beat the coons to the corn, sometimes they beat me. This year we caged the early corn after the coons showed up when it started silking and we got all of it after the cage went up. We intended to move the cage to the mid-season corn, but didn't get around to it in time, and the coons got every ear worth getting. It didn't deter them in the least that the corn was interplanted "Three Sisters Style" with Seminole pumpkins and Red Ripper southern peas.

They'll tear holes in window screens on your screened porch so they can get onto it to search for food, even though we don't feed any animals on that porch and no food is there. (The coons are the main reason our former screened porch is now a sunroom with glass windows instead of mere screens.)

They even climb up on patio furniture on the front porch, stand on the furniture and knock on the window sometimes trying to get you to feed them. (They must have found someone who will feed them if they do this. We never feed them and usually send our dog, Sam, outside to chase them off. He's a good coon-chasing dog.)

We have neighbors who have outdoor dogs that stay out all the time and if they forget to bring in the dog food bowls at night, the coons get into it even though the dogs are in the fenced dog yard too.
Some years the coons are more of a problem than others. This year they are a huge, huge, huge problem here. In the past we trapped and released them if we could, but it is extremely hard to handle a violent coon in a cage and then we have to drive about 20 miles to find a place far enough away from other peoples' gardens and farm crops to release one, so we just shoot them.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Thread with Sequential Planting Calendar

Dawn,

Amen to the raccoon problem. My daughter says she used to lie in bed at night and listen to them going through her garden, destroying one stalk after another of the corn before they moved on to something else. This was in spite of her big Rottweiler in the back yard and the fact that they had shot several of them. Very little deters them, and they can be extremely dangerous to approach. People simply have no idea the damage they can do to the human body if they feel challenged or threatened. I agree that trapping and then shooting is the best way to deal with them. We have a huge live trap for that very purpose. Of course, we also had a bobcat roaming around and I'm tired of losing chickens, chicks, and even lambs. No more nice guy (or lady.) We have a 6' high perimeter fence of chain link. Anything that gets inside it is now considered fair game. It may sound harsh, but I killed six skunks last year before we could keep them out of the chicken pens. Enough is enough.

Thanks for the planting calendar. I'm sure it will be a big help.

Pat

Pat, I long for the days when we first moved here and I adored all the wildlife because I didn't know any better! I loved looking out the window and seeing raccoons sitting on the porch railing looking back at me. As you can imagine, it took me an extremely short time to understand that real wildlife is not cute and cuddly like cartoon characters.

We try as much as possible to live peaceably with all of them. We only mow and keep a couple of acres 'civilized' and any predatory wildlife there in the civilized areas is fair game in terms of being removed. The smart ones stay on the remaining acreage that we leave wild for them.

This year we have shot several skunks and many racoons and only a couple of snakes (water moccasins in the lily pond). We've had much worse years, but not lately. Some years bobcats are a problem and other years they aren't. Foxes, possums, armadilloes and ringtailed cats are nice to have around in general as long as they leave our pets and the chickens alone. A cornered possum, or a possum who's decided it wants to eat the cats' food despite the cat's objection, can be a formidable opponent. This is the worst raccoon year in ages. Some years in the past coyotes have been a huge problem, but not so much in 2009-2010 (coincidentally their virtual disappeance in our neighborhood occurred when the cougars were reappearing). This year there's been fewer cougar sightings and a lot more coyotes are around. It's always something.

We go out of our way to provide food and water for the wild critters to the extent that we can, but that is a two-edged sword because it often attracts predators too.

All our pets are inside before dark and don't go outside until after daybreak, except for a semi-feral cat who's raising 4 kittens in our shrubbery. Eventually she and kittens will be tame enough that we can catch them, take them to the vet, get them neutered and get them their shots, and then bring them inside at night for safety. Mama Cat has been coming here to be fed for a couple of months, and she moved her kittens here from wherever they were born and kept hidden about 2 or 3 weeks ago. I always bring in their food before dark, which she doesn't like, but I don't want it to attract any wild critters that might hurt her or the babies. The babies still mostly run and hide when they see me, but one of the four will stand pretty close to me (close enough to touch) while I'm putting out food for them. We took in another feral kitten a couple of months before this mama showed up. Actually, there were 2 but one was sick and died, and even though we've been feeding him since March, and he's been coming inside to sleep since late May, he still freaks out if a human touches him. Eventually he'll calm down. We've rescued lots of dumped and abandoned pets that people seem to think can survive on their own "in the country". Most abandoned pets get hit in the roadway where they hang around waiting for their owners to come back and get them, or the dogs get shot when they start running in packs and killing goats, kids (goat kids not people kids), colts, calves, chickens, etc. All our dogs are rescue dogs and so are all our cats. Each animal we take in, tame and save becomes immensely spoiled, but I just feel grateful we're
able to give them a home and keep them safe from the abundant wildlife.

You're welcome. I hope the calendar is helpful. I just compiled the data in a sequential manner, taking it from the OSU fall planting guide where everything was listed alphabetically, which meant you had to jump from item to item to figure out the dates and I found that confusing. I like it in black and white in calendar order because it is a lot less confusing.

Dawn

Someone mentioned a variety of dwarf sweet corn recently, and now I can't find it anyplace. Does anyone know what that might be? It's only supposed to get 4-5' tall and bears 4 or 5 cobs rather than just two. I think it has one of the butter-and-sugar names, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is.

Pat