I have given up trying to grow sweet corn. There is a farm in Newcastle which is very close to me that has about 30 acres of sweet corn every spring. The cost of it at the farm was $18 per bushel this spring and my plans are to count on them for my sweet corn this next spring. We got 3 bushels that is all put up in the freezer for creamed corn throughout the year till next spring. They take orders several days in advance and call you when yours is ready. If you are close to OKC and Newcastle(South side of OKC) they are a good source to count on.

Thanks for the info! I'm looking for info on growing corn for grinding, though, rather than sweet. Still, good info for those closer to OKC. :-)

Diane

Ah! Now you're talking! This is the first year, since we moved here, that corn didn't do well for us. We LOVE to grow corn for meal & grits. Here's link to a previous discussion on this.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Here is a link that might be useful: Corn for Meal and Grits 1

Here's another link, to still another thread on this. My personal secretary dug this up for me some months ago ;)

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Corn for Meal & Grits 2

Avidchamp,

I did a google search and T.G. Farms was the only one listed in Newcastle. Is that the farm you were referring to for purchasing corn? If not, would you mind sharing the name of the farm?

Thank you,
Lynn

Ooh, thanks, George! My eyes are crossing right now but I'll start digging in and taking notes in the morning!

Diane

George, yo've sold me on the Mesquakie! I've requested a catalog from Sandhill so I can order when it's available. Yay! Any idea (roughly) how much I'll need for that 100' x 75' plot? I'm sure I can figure it out tomorrow. Last night was one of little sleep and this morning one of little caffeine.

I've been one to have a bazillion varieties of everything. Since my seed stash drama, I've learned to appreciate the simplicity of just a few. So my new m.o. is to settle on a very few, reliable favorites to count on growing each year. Of course, nature is forever pulling pranks and making reliables not necessarily reliable but we can only control things so much.

I sure hope Mesquakie Indian corn fits the bill for me -- it sure sounds like it!

Diane, very rambly and yawny today

P.S. - Someone email me some coffee stat!

"I've learned to appreciate the simplicity of just a few"

Save that thought for 2011, this will not be the year for it.

Carol,

LOL After we all receive our 'seed swap' envelopes, I expect every one of us will be rethinking our 2010 garden plans so we can figure out how to squeeze in some more varieties that are new to us.

I've tried and tried to 'prune' my tomato grow list down to a minimal number, which for me probably would be 20-30 varieties, but I can already tell I am going to lose control and plant at least 50 different varieties. It is mostly Jay's fault, of course.

Diane,

You may have learned to appreciate the simplicity of a few, but I haven't. I want to grow it all!

Of course, with corn, it is much harder to grow a lot of varieties at the same time because of cross-pollination issues, but I try to grow two kinds in the spring/summer and two in the fall garden and that doesn't include ornamental corn.

Seriously, the advantage I see in growing many varieties is that it improves the chances of getting a great harvest because, while some varieties may fail or give a poor harvest in any given year, others will make up for it.

All of this is leading up to one thing......

and, in the future, you can refer to it as the "Great Seed Avalanche of 2009, In Which OwieBrain Was Deluged With Seeds". Trust me. Good things happen to good people and I believe your seed ship is about to sail into the harbor, thanks to Capt. Carol and her mighty crew. So, I think you'll just have to get over that whole simplicity thing, because we're going to ruin it for you. : )

Dawn

Okay, now you people are beginning to scare me...

LOL Just kidding!

I get the feeling this will be the best Christmas ever! I'm trying to tell myself I should let them under the tree and make myself wait until the 25th to open but I doubt I could wait that long!

Diane

Dawn,
I was always taught it is better too give than receive. And in this case with tomato seeds I beleive ten to twenty fold is appropiate!!!! HeHe. So for the Brandymaster I feel I need to send ten to twenty back in return. LOL. It is like the last few nights of going through seeds. I had a list made and promised myself I would stick to it. 35 varieties. But as you go through you remember that JT said that was a nice one and PV said something else was and so on. I have about a 1/3 to go and have at least 70 varieties in the baggie. I will attempt to whittle it down once I'm all the way through. And I still have several coming. I can't remember being this bad till I got on this forum and Dawn made a tomato addict out of me. LOL I really think I'm just a garden addict. HeHe Jay

Diane,

I hope it will be the best Christmas ever for all of us, amd I think it will be just because of the circle of caring and sharing expressed by the sharing of our seeds. I bet there is not a one of us who will take our envelope or box of seed packets from the swap and put them under the tree and save them for Christmas. I don't think any of us could stand to wait that long to see what's inside!

Jay,

Wait a minute. How in the world did I "make" you go out and accumulate approximately 400 varieties of tomato seeds? You can blame me for a whole lot of things, but not that. You were seriously addicted long before you and I "met" each other here on this forum. LOL

However, you can blame me for my constant encouragement to "go ahead" and buy or plant a few dozen more varieties. I'll accept the blame for that.

I've been working on my list too, and it is not going well at all. I actually have two lists.

The first is "my" list and is pretty much based on seeds I already have and the few new ones I've ordered, like the Brandymaster series, and I started that list in July or August and hoped to keep it pretty small......with small meaning (in my world) maybe 35 varieties at the most.

The second list is "your" list, meaning that it involves me going back and looking at your list of almost 400 varieties that you have and are offering to share. From that list, I'm trying to compile a list of ONLY the ones I feel I absolutely, positively, must, must, must, must must try ASAP. I have no idea how this list is going to turn out. First I wrote down the ones I've wanted to try for a long time. Then I racked my brain to remember some you'd mentioned had done well for you so I could add them to the list. Then I jotted some down that sounded interesting and started researching them.....

So, I think you know how the second list is going. It is growing and growing and I am all bogged down in research as the rain/snow clouds are creeping across the river.

When I finish the second list, I'll e-mail you and beg, quite nicely and "pretty, pretty please" for you so send me some of those. I know Carol is still waiting to see if I ask for as many different ones as she did.

Diane, I'm sorry. I know we have hijacked your corn thread with seed talk. I hope you'll forgive us, and I expect you will, because I remember your tomato variety list from around 2005, 2006, etc. and I think it was quite an impressive list too. (Jay and I clearly are not the only tomato addicts here!)

Returning to corn. George does make Mesquakie sound so impressive, doesn't he? I like Black Aztec or Aztec Black or whatever it is too. You can use it in the milk stage as a sweet corn, or let it mature to grind up into corn meal. I wonder if my family would eat bluish colored cornbread? (I think they would because they only freaked out momentarily about eating lavender-colored mashed potatoes the first time I made mashed potatoes using some of the All Blue potatoes I'd grown in the garden.) I'm going to use a thick, dense planting of one of those two varieties of corn, I think, as the first crop on a new garden bed to be broken up this winter, even though I know I'll have to fight the bermuda grass there the first year because it undoubtedly will try to come in a strangle the corn plants.

Dawn

Wait a minute here.....I gave him a list of 18 that I was interested in from his list. I didn't expect to receive 18. I just wanted him to pick a few from those 18. I'm not addicted like you guys. LOL

Carol,
When you say you expected me to whittle down a tomato list you are an addict for sure. As you have surely figured out by now I'm not capable of that. LOL So a sign you want them all but this way you have an excuse.. Jay

Jay, your no better than Dawn when it comes to feeding addictions. LOL

....and who is it that would like to go see the Tomato Man's Daughter and Baker Creek in the spring....besides me of course?

Carol,

Only 18? You only saw 18 you felt you had to try from that magnificent list of almost 400 varieties? LOL

I'm afraid my list will be longer than that, but I think Jay knew that before he posted the list. As he always says "it takes one to know one".

I think my list will surprise Jay, though I'm not sure if it will surprise him in a good way....or in a bad way! Time will tell.

Dawn

Let's put it in perspective.....

I have two average size lots and a limited amount of tomato cages.

You, on the other hand have 14 acres and hundreds of cages.

Of course, none of this "failure to perform" up to your standards has anything to do with my age.

I may have 40 tomato plants total and you can't limit yours to 40-50 different kinds of tomato plants.

Of course, you know how many I would have if I could, don't you? It is a little embarassing how many seeds I have now.

Carol,

I do have 14.4 acres but it is mostly wooded, so sadly I cannot garden on most of it. Only a couple of acres is not covered in trees, and it has the house, 300+ feet of driveway, the gravel parking area, the detached barn/garage, three chicken coops with attached runs, a shed, 5 ponds, a swamp, three creeks, the dog yard, the pecan and fruit trees, etc. My garden is really only about 60' x 80' plus about 40-50 containers every year. I hope to double or triple the amount of garden space over the winter, but that means taking out one tree or maybe two or three and plowing up/tilling up most of the 'flat land' that's left, and some of the sloping land...because we're in a hollow and almost all our land slopes except for the half-acre where the house and barn/garage and 'yard' are.

When we bought this place, I thought I'd have me a little 30' x 40' or 40' x 40' garden and would be satisfied with that. By now it is clear that even 60' x 80' is not enough. Probably 120' x 120' won't be enough, but there's a limit to what I can do with the topography of the land we have. Sometimes I daydream about what it would be like if a tornado came through and took out a half-acre of trees, leaving me a larger, semi-flat sunny area for an enlarged garden. Of course, it would need to be the half-acre of woods closest to the house and current garden because there's a limit to how far I'm willing to pipe irrigation water.

Since our amount of flat, sunny land is limited, I've become a master at packing plants into absolutely every square inch of improved soil. I use succession planting so there's never bare ground. For example, I started my black-eyed peas in paper bathroom-size (3 oz., I think) cups. The day I harvested the last of the broccoli, I pulled out the plants in the morning, blanched and froze the broccoli in the early afternoon, and transplanted the black-eyed peas before dark. Within 5 or 6 weeks, I was harvesting black-eyed peas. My whole garden is that way...everything has a replacement just waiting for it to be removed so I can pop in the replacement.

There's a guy who lives near us who plowed up about 2 acres of his land and put in a big garden this year. He did have that land cleared of many years' worth of trees and undergrowth. I was envious.....but I wouldn't sacrifice 50 years worth of tree growth to open up two acres for gardening. At least, I don't think I will....

It is not embarassing how many seeds you have. It is smart. If worldwide famine or flooding or whatever kind of wacky weather or bizarre disease wipes out all the commercial seed-production farms, you're in good shape, because you have enough seeds to last a few years. I do too. To me, there is security in having too many seeds because no matter what happens, I know I'll have 'enough'. LOL

Although, my tomato mantra is....you can never have too many!

Dawn

It is hard to find a good place to garden at most homes, I think. I only have one choice to garden in the ground and that is my fenced backyard. My neighbors have told me that at some point it was all garden, but I am having a hard time getting it ready to garden again. Someone planted virginia creeper along the north fence line and that stuff is awful. It sends out runners both under the ground and on the ground surface for 5 or 6 feet. The vine is pretty, but it is a nuisance plant as far as I am concerned. On the south fence I had climbing sweet pea vines, and on the west I had something that was kind of briar looking, but no thorns, and a spot that always had poke, no matter what I did. It has all been killed but I am still working with root problems.

One year my neighbor saw me in the back yard and came over to visit. He knew I had been trying to clean up the fence without cutting down the Virginia Creeper. He sat there awhile and then he picked up my nippers and headed for our fence. He cut for just a minute and chopped some large stuff. He came back and sat down and we watched one of the vines just "croak", right then and there. He was so worried about it, and I was thrilled. That plant had covered half of the fence and it was the half nearest the planted area. Then he got married and his wife didn't like it any better than I did, so we have gradually taken it off the fence. Of course, the roots hadn't all died so every year I was pulling up roots. Although I covered the entire area with RoundUp last spring, I am still fighting old roots and they get hung up in the tiller.

Once when Bill (gonefish'n) was alive he saw a picture of my garden. He told me my garden looked great but that he would be worried about having a tree so close to the garden. What he couldn't see in the picture was that I had three trees just around my fence line and two of them weren't mine. That winter the ice storm broke so many limbs on the tree west of me that the neighbor had it taken down. Aww, too bad.

A couple of years later, my neighbor that cut the vine, had a tree split during an ice storm, and the half that fell landed in my garden and was so huge that it almost touched the three fences and the house, so now that one doesn't shade my garden. Aww, too bad.

The one left is a smaller tree and is mine. Dealing with the roots is kind of a mess, but I sure like the shade when I am working and need a place to rest. Now that I am old, I seem to use that more often. LOL I have several areas of my garden that are shaded by two of the neighbors storage buildings in the late afternoon, but the plants have had enough sunshine by that time anyway and it offers them a little protection from the intense heat in mid-summer. I can work many hours of the day in my garden by just starting early in the spots that get no shade and working my way to the shade as the day progresses and the heat intensifies.

We built a small chicken house that has a pen on the bottom, and a house above and they can go up a ramp to get inside where the roost is. It is narrow and sits with it's back to the neighbors shed. I bought the lumber today to extend the run 16 feet down the fence line from the coop. It will only be 3 feet wide but will provide a barrier from the grass that creeps in from next door. It will also cover the area that has the poke patch that never ends. Since I have had the chickens, they trim back the few plants that have come up since I sprayed. This 3 x 16 part is only going to be a couple of feet high. It will only be for daytime use, and at night they will be back in the coop. Some love the roost upstairs, but the Sultans like the ground, or the ramp. It has wire on the floor but it is vinyl coated with about 2x4 openings. You can't see the wire, but it is down there to keep out other critters. We still have a few things to do to the chicken coop, but they are living in it anyway. They get out to run for an hour or so everyday in the garden, so it has worked out OK for them but they are growing fast. We still have to put the metal on the roof and build the nest boxes into the end. The metal probably will get put on when my neighbor is home since he has a plasma cutter that makes things a lot easier. Besides that, I can't do the metal by myself. We have it, but just haven't gotten it on. So far the rains have been light so they are only getting a few drips down through the roof. For the run, I am building 8 foot sections with lumber on all sides and wire in the center. Maybe I can finally keep the grass from creeping in by letting the chickens keep it cleared.

Most years that I have had a garden here, I have planted about half of the backyard because I still had lawn on part of it and then because of all of the roots it was hard to go up to the fence with anything. This year I started to reclaim it all. Most of the grass is gone but I still have other things coming up, so it's not done yet but I think it is to the point I can plant it and just mulch heavily and weed it for awhile.

We are talking about changing our fence so that it goes all the way across our back property line and comes out far enough to enclose our sheds and things into the backyard. Some of it has buildings on it but I could probably plant some of it also. It would include the area where we had the cedar trees taken out this year and where I plan to have a greenhouse someday. Someday is far away, because this is the year of the kitchen. Diane has "the year of the corn", "year of the bean", at our house we have the "year of the renovation" of this or that. I hope we aren't too old to enjoy it by the time we finish. LOL

Anyway, the moral of this story is, that eventhough the land may be flat, you still can't plant in all of it. I am blessed that the back yard soil has been improved and has almost no rocks, but that is not the case in parts of the yard. I have one flower bed that I wonder how anything grows in. I guess the roots just work there way around the rocks. I also have a septic system and a large leeching field.

I plant in containers also, but my big old nursery tree pots are probably seeing their last year this year. I have lots of smaller ones, but the big ones are about gone. My DH asked down at solid waste if they ever got feed tubs. They told him they did, but they all fought over them and took them home. LOL

I don't have fruit trees and really don't have room for any. I bought two small blueberry plants in the spring and grew them in containers until a few weeks ago. My DH dug the holes for me and we just kind of dropped them in the ground with all the soil and peat that was in the pot. Just after we planted them, we had a huge rain, so they seem to have settled in nicely.

What does all of this have to do with planting corn, and stealing Diane's thread. Only this -- I think I finally have cleared enough area that I can plant a small patch of corn. HeeHee Diane, like you, I am going to be planting corn for grinding instead of sweet corn. I bought a pack of yellow Hickory King dent corn, and if I like it I am going to try the white one the following year. Either that, or switch to the one that George grows.

Wow, this thread has really grown quickly! I lost the use of my wireless Internet, with my job, and I just haven't had time to check in with our dial up. Hopefully today I'll have wireless again.

Diane, I am big on Mesquakie Indian Corn, though I recognize that there are MANY good corns out there. My dream would be that many gardeners, with the isolation space and/or time available, would adopt many kinds of corn to maintain.

This was a horrible year for corn for us. I was too busy with work to get our Cherokee Squaw corn in at all. Mesquakie looked like it wasn't going to do anything, and, indeed, part of the planting didn't (with a little help from our livestock). Yet, when we gleaned from it, at the end of the season, we still got a respectable amount of corn from those little nubbins.

In our limited experience, of only one year, growing Cherokee Squaw, I have to say that I REALLY like it too. (Sandhill Preservation should be carrying it in 2010.)It has larger kernels which shell off of the cob very easily. In 2010, Lord willing, I will put the priority on Cherokee Squaw, though I hope to grow both. Take a gander at what DarJones wrote about this variety in the link below.

It is amazing how far a little seed will go. One ought to plant a minimum of 250-300 plants in order to maintain vigor in the saved seed. And then, select seed from a minimum of a dozen ears of corn (my personal estimate). I prefer to save seed from at least a dozen ears, but then, when we've shelled all the corn, I'll grab a number of handfuls from the bucket and add it to my seed corn.

I imagine Black Aztec would be a great corn to grow. I hear it is fairly sweet in the milk stage and I'm sure it would make good meal.

I think I mentioned this elsewhere. But a good vigorous corn is a great crop to grow on newly broken ground. With two hoeings it will then outgrow almost any weed, even Bermuda. If one grows a vigorous cowpea on the edges, they will overgrow the corn after it stops growing, and they will further smother the weeds. I hear that Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin was grown on the edges of cornfields to do the same thing. I can believe it. It outgrew Bermuda. I generally plant my corn a foot apart in rows 4 to 4 1/2 feet apart.

Lord willing, in the coming year, we're going to plant more corn, cowpeas and sweet potatoes, trying to grow more that takes less work yet which produces well.

George

Here is a link that might be useful: Blue Marbutt Bean

Carol, One thing that makes me crazy is that we looked at another piece of land and liked it before we bought this place. It was very flat and almost entirely treeless, but Tim wanted trees like he grew up with in Pennsylvania...lots and lots of trees. So, we bought this strip of mostly unusable creek hollow land and he has all the trees his heart desired. Every time I drive past the flat land we almost bought, I wonder "what if...." However, with no trees on it and no leaves to gather, soil improvement (it has the same kind of clay we have) would have been a lot harder. I also notice when the current owner had a pond dug on it a few years ago that they had lots of rocks in that clay, so it probably is a good thing that we didn't buy it. I really hate having to dig out rocks.

I have trumpet creeper near the house and near the driveway gate. It is too invasive near the house but not down by the driveway gate where the thick clay makes it hard for anything to grow. Of course, down by the driveway gate it gets only rainfall and I think that helps keep is under control too.

George,

I'm using corn on the new garden patch specifically because you mentioned that it works well for shading out bermuda on newly broken ground. I'll probably plant cowpeas (I'm thinking either Clay or Mandy (aka Red Ripper) because Clay grows well in Clay (duh) and Manydy/Red Ripper merely because it is so very vigorous. I also plan to plant several kinds of winter squash/pumpkins around the edges of the corn patch. Between the three, I hope to keep the bermuda from infiltrating the new bed too badly. That also will open up the current "Three Sisters" garden for some other veggie, and most likely it will be pole beans. I have a whole lot of bean seed I want to plant, including Musica and Garrafal Oro.

Thanks for the info on Cherokee Squaw corn. Now I'll have to give that one some consideration. For DarJones to say its the best OP corn he's planted....well, that kind of a statement gets your attention, doesn't it.

So many varieties......so little time and space.

Hope you get good news and internet wireless back today, and the sooner, the better. : )

Dawn

I love thread drift! It's like life and so much more interesting that way.

Bill/gonefishin' is gone?? I enjoyed his posts and photos. :-(

Thanks for the other corn recommendations! I'll check them out, too. :-)

Diane

Dawn this morning about sunrise I was driving to Liberal for an eye exam. And that is when things sometimes just seem to pop into my mind. For sometime I had thought Tomato addict ect wasn't a fair nickname for you. And it dawned on me. We have a trucking company in this area that the trucks all have "The Elite Fleet" on them. You are our "Elite Gardener." And when you say something it is like Dar Jones saying it. I pay attention. Jay

Diane,

Our beloved and respected Bill P. left us last year. It seems like it wasn't long after you had Josie, so I think you probably missed it because you were busy with that new baby girl.

I think we lost him in Feb. or March of 2008, and I'll try to find the Veggie Forum thread where GardenWeb member "DavidandKasie" found and posed his obituary.

By the way, I received several kinds of corn in the seed swap, so I think I'll try to plant more kinds, using several rows of thickly planted sunflowers and amaranths between each different variety to see if I can prevent cross-pollination. I'm also going to try to stagger the plantings so they pollinate at different times.

Jay,

I sure hope the eye exam went well 'cause I'd hate to find you've been driving around blind lately. : )

Oh my! I don't know if I can keep my head from swelling now. I am blushing and turning beet red. For you to even mention my name in the same breath as Fusion's is enormously flattering.

The Fairness Doctrine requires me to point out that we have quite a few elite gardeners here and I am, by no means, the only one, if I am one at all. I don't want to try to list all our elite gardeners by name for fear I will leave someone out and hurt their feelings, but there are so many experienced and knowledgeable gardeners here who have taught me so much, including you. Having said that, I often learn new things even from people who consider themselves to be fairly new or new gardeners. To me, that's the magic of this forum---the way we all learn from one another and the way we help one another.

And, speaking of corn, it was not the best corn year here, but we got some of it before the raccoons got the rest. I only have 6 gallon bags of frozen corn-on-the-cob left in the freezer, so I am going to have to start rationing it out. The next corn harvest seems light years away.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Bill P.'s obtituary is linked in this thread

I didn't reread that thread before I linked it, so I didn't know the obit link was broken.

The below link does have his obit. and a photo.

I miss his many words of gardening wisdom and his photos too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Web Member Bill P.'s Obit from 03/08