depends on a couple things what the pollination timing is in relation to the maturities,modern dent corn has been bred to pollinate longer due to weather conditions high temps affect pollination if it was me i would move the two as far away from each other as possible thinking about where the prevailing wind comes from to avoid cross pollination,dent corn will effect the flavor of sweet corn to the bad.

Unfortunately not much room to separate, the whole plot is 30x50 and the corn patch needs to be all on the north. The dent I'm talking about is heirloom hickory king; based on last year it seemed like the pollination period was rather long, maybe a month.

Maybe I could start the sweet indoors now for a small planting. I'll plant the dent in late may so that could separate them almost a month in time.

in that size of a space can u purchase one or the other locally for your needs,sometimes people look at the value of a paticular vegetable and concetrate on the higher valued ones on there own but if the local farmers market has a guy who grows the best of something common reasonably cheap,it might b easier to let him do it and buy it from him or trade with a buddy knowing this year i grow dent you grow sweetcorn trade even up and switch varieties next year.im concered with cross pollination,when seedcorn is produced here in the midwest companies want a buffer of so many hundred feet for cross pollination and may not keep so many rows of protection in for that reason for seed,you have even less than this im almost positive you might be a lil dissappointed in the flavor of your sweetcorn,talk to your local county extension agent or email an agronomy professor at a big ten land grant college,cornell university has a very good online vegitable/horticulture site,probaly one of these avenues can give you precise info.sry im not real familiar with east coast ag universities.

pnbrown

farmboy's advice is good. But I'm sure you can plant them physically close together if you can arrange their sowing so they aren't releasing pollen at the same time.

So you'd need to know these things:

Approximate DTM of each variety
Length of pollination activity of each variety

If they both have approximately the same DTM and the dent corn has a long pollination period, you'd probably be safe if they were planted physically close together a month to five weeks apart. Even longer between sowings would probably be safer. If the DTM are NOT the same, pull out your calculator and figure it out based on their general maturity dates.

I like Anney's comments. I grow two corns and the first year I did that, I planted them about a month apart, and with a couple hundred feet isolation (not much, in my opinion, but something). I watched like a hawk and was relieved to see that they didn't overlap in their pollen production. So, we got two pure seed crops. Two weeks would be really close, unless the later planting were for a later corn.

George
Tahlequah, OK

I am doing the exact same thing pnbrown. My sweet corn said 80 DTM (golden bantam), the dent 120 DTM, I planted the sweet one 3 weeks before the dent (also Hickory King) to give them even more of a spread in DTM. In theory this should work, however, I have noticed quite a range in germination times, so I have a mix of older and younger of both the sweet and the dent, even though all dent was sown together and all sweet was sown at the same time too. I guess there is a distribution (gaussian?) so on the tail ends I might have some problems with cross pollination. What I mean is that perhaps the latest sprouting sweet will still cross with the earliest sprouting dent. More genetic diversity in the heirloom corns maybe causes different sprouting times? If I had had this information (about the spread in germination) I would still be planting both, but probably would have separated them in time by 5 or 6 weeks rather than 3. We'll see, it might still work, but since you have not planted yet, I am alerting you to this, since all you have to do is spread them in time a bit more than two weeks. Worse comes to worse I'll have more flour/grits corn since the sweet will not affect the dent, just the other way around. I will report if I get crosses or not.

Good information. I will be trying corn for the first time this year. Excuse my ignorance, but what is dent corn?

Dent corn is a type/types of field corn. It is grown for the dried grain usually unless it is harvested early for silage.

The dates to maturity mean little when comparing sweet corn to dent corn as you harvest [maturity] them at different stages from each other.

Thanks for the info, folks, may be useful at some point. For this year, we've decided not to provide any sweet corn for the racoons. On this particular plot the dent's primary purpose will be to trellis beans. I'm going to try growing them in clumps of four plants on 4-foot centers to reduce the tendency to blow down when loaded with bean-vines.

"...the sweet will not affect the dent, just the other way around."

I did not know this. Can someone elaborate on this or confirm it? Does it apply to flint corn as well as dent? I'm planning a three sisters garden and cannot control the types of corn which might be planted nearby.

Jim

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/cornucop/msg1011095625390.html

Jim, I read this on one of the thread from last year:
"corn for grits and meal2"

...or in one of the links within that thread for other threads....and I did observe something like that, but I have limited experience, so hopefully someone else will confirm.

I crossed some sweet and blue corn and it seems only the sweet was affected, it became more like a field corn. I think someone else mentioned they observed that but I don't remember whom? this forum has become so busy and threads do not stay on one page for long.

In any case, reading those threads helped me pick what to put in a 3 sister's garden, and I also added nasturtiums too.

Here is a link that might be useful: corn for meal and grits