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.

Shagnasty I have also been through a rough year on fruits. All of my figs were in full leaf with young figs setting and all were lost to the Easter freeze. The older trees recovered and set nice crops. The record warm period at present is waking figs up a little. There are a few small figs showing on several varieties. If we don't get slammed with an extreme cold blast, we'll probably be ok and lose only a few of next years crop. This has been my experience for 20+ years. Jack

Hey Rita, Boy, can I ever relate to not having much space! I will tell you that I have no choice but to grow iris close together, and they have always done beautifully for me. Right now, in my main bed of iris, there are lots of summer blooming annuals--zinnias and cosmos. Larkspur grows really early here, and my first iris start blooming in late April, so those two looked really nice together. When you see photos from Schreiner's they always have lupines growing with the iris. I grow Sea Power and love it. It is a beautiful flower. Keppel and Joe Ghio have a lot of ruffled iris. Check out Adoregon and Kitty Kay from Keppel and Forever Blowing Bubbles by Ghio. I grew FBB this year and was blown away by its garden presence, and My Beloved looks like an even bigger, more dramatic version, though I haven't ordered it. Good luck, Mike in SC

Suzie, I plant Early Sunglow sweet corn every year for my early corn, normally planting the seed as soon as possible after the danger of frost has passed. Because it has such a short DTM, it usually produces a harvest by Memorial Day weekend. Both the plants and ears are small, but then most early corn varieties do produce small ears. I buy the seed right off the rack some years, but at the farm stores where I find it, it often sells out pretty early. I'm guessing that is because it is used by a lot of people fort their early corn since it can withstand late freezes and frosts to some degree.. One huge advantage of early corn is that it often matures ears even before the corn earworms and European corn borers arrive. I think I have seen Early Sunglow on the seed racks at either Lowe's, Home Depot or Wal-Mart this year, but not lately. If you have to order it, you normally can find it online at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The reason corn is planted in blocks is that it is wind pollinated and the pollen spreads around best when corn is planted in blocks of at least four rows. When you grow corn in one long row, pollination often is poor and when you harvest the ears, they may or may not have lots of kernels. Instead of planting one long row along the edge of a garden, just plant 4 shorter rows all together in a block. Be advised that if you have raccoons around, they love, love, love corn. In our earlier years here, I normally could get Early Sunglow to maturity before the raccoons even figured out I was growing corn. In more recent years, that has not been the case. One problem with the coons is that they will pick an ear, take a few bites of it and then discard it and eat part of another ear and apparently they do that all night long. It is not unusual for them to destroy dozens of ears in one night. Even worse, they won't wait for it to ripen, often pulling the ears 5-7 days before they'd be ready for a human being to harvest them, so you have a very slim chance of beating them to the corn. Most people who live near me in an admittedly rural area with high levels of wildlife have either given up planting corn altogther, or surround it with an electric fence to keep the raccoons out. I grow mine in a corn cage....a fenced garden just for the corn that has a poultry netting 'roof' to keep the raccoons out. This year in one of the new gardens I am going to plant corn without a corn cage or an electric fence. I am going to surround it with a double row of milk thistle plants in the hope that their big prickly leaves will keep the coons out of the corn. There are few things better than fresh corn on the cob. I like to harvest it and take it right inside and cook it and eat it right then. Since I plant a lot, some of it always does end up in the freezer. And, now that I have gotten better at fighting the raccoons, less and less of it ends up in their tummies. One of our neighbor's relatives had a corn patch that was a quarter mile long (I don't know how wide) and raccoons still got every ear. Another neighbor's brother trapped and shot raccoons every single night...18 raccoons in 18 nights....in order to protect his corn and save his harvest and he still got zero ears. Corn is very popular with squirrels and other wildlife too, so be aware of that. Often you won't have an issue the first year, but in subsequent years, as they discover what you're growing, you'll have to fight them for every single bit of it. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Early Sunglow's Description at SESE