Dorothy,

Since they already know corn is there, and they have figured out you keep replanting it, I am not sure if you can stop them this year. Clearly they have gotten used to the pie pans too, so you have to try something else. Some people string clear fishing line in a random pattern back and forth from fence pole to fence pole over the top of the corn and the crows stay away because they don't like flying into the fishing line.

You can try mulching with straw if you haven't already. When I mulch with straw, the crows don't bother the newly sprouted corn.....I think they can't tell it is corn when it is surrounded by straw and just think it is green grass in the middle of dormant grass.

You can try bird netting thrown loosely over the corn bed but I don't know if it will work.

You can bribe them the way I do.

I put out several small piles of hen scratch in an open area about 200' from my veggie garden for the crows every morning. They show up at the hen scratch to eat around sunrise if there's any left from the day before, eat and leave. If there isn't any henscratch left over from the previous day, they sit on the barbed wire fence and wait for me to bring them their hen scratch. The crows haven't bothered my garden once since I started offering them these bribes. As a bonus, they are very serious about protecting "their" piles of henscratch and chase away any birds who even try to fly near it. They also chase away every hawk that shows up throughout the day, so the poultry can roam freely with little worry of hawk predation.

It sounds like a rough corn year at your house. My crop that has suffered the most from the torrential rains and late freezes is the potatoes, which froze three times and then some of the last planting drowned. I have replanted so many times that I have plants in all kinds of sizes.

Dawn

What a great idea putting hen scratch out for those free loaders. I thought about that in order to get myself a wild turkey dinner.

I don't have gophers but I do have moles, for the first time anywhere I've lived. They won't go into my swamp area in the spring or they'd drown, but as it dries out they start making their tunnels. At first I tried drowning them out by running a hose down one of their tunnels, but the water ran forever, and never did fill up and come back out of the hole. I leave them alone now. I might loose a plant or two, but I figure they're improving my spring drainage problem.

Shekanahh

I had some spotty corn this year too. It was all on ends of rows where about 4 feet of corn was missing...never did see it sprout. Instead of replanting, I just planted two hills of pie pumpkins. I think I will still have plenty of corn for the two of us.

I think something ate the seeds underground since the other seeds germinated very good with no missing spots.

Gardening is always something new and no matter how long we have been doing it, we have our failures!

P.S. Dorothy, I answered your question about the 'two' roses on my fence in a separate thread on Ozarks Forum. One, the white, was a clematis Huldine.

Thanks for the ideas. We usually have the corn mulched before this, but this year has been so wet that we've delayed (9 inches in May and it was wet when May started) So tomorrow we mulch. It's getting so late I don't know how much more we will plant, but George gave me a few more tomatoes so they will go in some of the gaps.

Someone also suggested buying yellow plastic "crime-scene" tape and tying it to tall poles to flutter. I may try that.

Dorothy,

You also could use surveyor's tape, which is less expensive than crime scene tape. I have used surveyor's tape to scare deer away from certain plants, although eventually they get used to it and ignore it.

Some people plant sprouted garlic in their corn patch area two to three to four weeks before they plant corn. The dastardly crows pull up the garlic sprouts, which of course they do not like, and then tend to avoid the corn sprouts, perhaps thinking they are only more garlic sprouts. It might be something to try next year.

I'm behind on mulching too--18" of rain here (miraculous!) since April 28th or 29th and I don't know if my lower corn bed ever will dry out enough to mulch. Without the usual heavy mulch, I'm really having to fight a lot of weeds there.

Dawn