I saw that video. I need a planter lol. My back is ready for a rest.

Way to go Johnny.

luvncannin,

I bought that planter in East Texas. I paid $125.00 and spent about $200.00 repairing it. John Deere stocks every part on it. It was made in about 1960.The longer I own it, the more I like it. I believe it would plant just fine in a rough plowed field.

It was worth driving to East Texas for.

Johnny

PS - It is called a lister planter. The plow on the front is a lister plow.

It scrapes away the dry soil on top, then plants into the moist soil a few inches lower.

love bodacious sweet corn have been planting it for years

I guess we are on totally different schedules, Johnny, because my corn is getting to be head high. If I was just planting corn down here this late, I'd be worried that the usual summer heat and drought might keep me from getting good tip fill in the ears. I guess that being on different schedules is inevitable, given that we are gardening at opposite ends of the state. I hope you get a great harvest this summer!

Kim, You need a wheeled garden seeder, like an Earthway, Glaser or Hoss. Well, unless y'all have a tractor, which opens up the possibilities even futher.

Here's an example of a wheeled garden seeder:

Earthway Precision Garden Seeder

Dawn,

We will be planting our Dia de San Juan even later. It is supposed to be planted June 24. We will be planting it about two weeks early.

We planted sweet corn when we could. It has been too wet. I have had corn seed rot in cold wet soil.

For that matter, I have had okra seed rot in the same conditions.

Like you have said so many times, plant when the conditions are right, not by the calendar.

Mother nature has been fickle as usual this year.

Johnny

I only planted mine last week. Has been too wet and cool. I tried before,but they didn't come up. We get what we get, I guess. The bugs will be happy. lolz

I planted mine in mid-March. It was hot at the time, and I was determined to get the corn off to an early start in case El Nino faded quickly and summer turned into a barn burner. I had to cover it up on a couple of cool nights but only a couple. It has been through a lot of wind, dry weather, hail, above average temperatures and then a big cooldown in May. Now it is enduring floodwaters running through it every time we get a hard rain. It looks great though.

One of my main corn issues, Johnny, is the coons. They'll get every ear if they can. The earlier I plant, the greater the odds that I'll get to harvest our corn. Because the coons don't really expect ripe sweet corn until mid-June or later, if I can get it to mature before mid-June, I can get it harvested before they realize it is ripe. We local gardeners vs. the coons is like an elaborate chess match every year.

A few years back, the coons got all of everyone's corn. I don't remember if it was because we couldn't plant early or what, but our neighbor's brother-in-law had 4 rows of corn than ran 1/4 mile long, and the coons got every ear. Another neighbor trapped and shot a coon every night for 18 nights in a row in an effort to save his crop, and the coons still got every single ear. He probably could have trapped more than one per night if he'd had a couple more traps, but I still doubt he'd have won the battle. Here near the river, it may not seem like we have all that many coons, but just let the corn start to get sweet, and they show up in droves and eat it, tossing half-eaten ears on the ground, over a handful of days. Being smart, they harvest it before it is actually ripe so they can beat us to it.

Planting early also usually means we beat the corn earworms, but I planted a 90-day corn and the earworms already had shown up when it had been in the ground for about 45 days. Ha, ha, the joke was on them because there weren't any ears to eat yet. However, they started eating the leaves, so I had to do some emergency cutting of the earworms with a pair of scissors. A couple of snip, snips, and there were no longer any earworms eating the leaves.

When I plant late, we usually don't get a good crop, but most years it is because of the wildlife, not the heat. A year like 2011 when the temperatures get hot enough to denature the pollen is actually fairly rare.

Dawn,

Good luck. I still have a couple of gallon bags of last years sweet corn.

We are planting about half an acre of field corn soon. We will have enough corn for cornbread all Winter.

Johnny

PS - I'll be looking for bandit tracks around our gardens.(;-)

Johnny we have cute little Massey Ferguson that does not run. Yet. And I tried an earthquake last year. It was great for what I did with it. We only got to borrow it one week. Alot of wasted seed but saves time.

luvncannin,

I have used quite a few planters. The old John Deere in our video has a number of beneficial features. The main feature you would find useful is the seed plate can be changed. You can even custom make your own seed plates from blanks sold by http://www.lincolnagproducts.com/ 

The main thing I like about it is the reliable and uniform way it plants even in stiff (or hard) soil. They really made them to do a good job and last a good long time.

John Deere still stocks all of the parts even though the planter was made decades ago, circa 1960.

One limitation is that it won't work with very small seed. The smallest seed I have planted with it is okra.

Johnny

I used to think those little bandits were cute until I realized what bandits they are. Also, they kill chickens like crazy. Now the little bandits are not so cute and never, ever welcome here.

Dawn,

My neighbor had a problem with those critters. He put electric fencing on the outside of his chicken coop. He can hear them scream when they touch one of those wires.

Johnny

luvncannin,

Here is a picture of the seed plate.

Johnny, We would put up electric fencing if we had to, I think, but we don't have to because we have a chicken coop and chicken run that are predator proof NOW. They weren't always predator proof, although we thought they were. Nothing will find any errors you made in building a coop like the raccoons will. Our biggest problem is if a chicken does not return to the coop at nightfall after a day of free ranging. The odds are it will not survive until morning because something roaming around at night will get it. Our first coop had a skylight (made of a clear greenhouse fiberglass panel) to get more light into the coop. An owl crashed through the skylight. Lesson learned. Our current coops have windows, not skylights. Oh, and the owl was injured so we had to move it to an unused chicken run and give it time to heal before we released it. I like owls in general but not when they are in the chicken coop or chicken run.

In our first year here, raccoons would climb up on the patio furniture sitting on the front porch and would knock on our windows wanting to be fed. Then, if you opened the front door to chase them off, they'd panic and climb the porch pillars. I suspect somebody in our neighborhood was feeding them. That was in 1999. I still thought they were cute then but didn't feed them. Now, many garden wars and chicken wars later, I don't like them at all, and have learned they are quite vicious. We run them off when we see them, but we don't see nearly as many as we used to. A bad outbreak of distemper that was very widespread on the Texas side of the Red River a few years ago seems to have wiped out a lot of them. We used to see them every single night in our yard. Now we see them maybe once a month, though there's no telling how many are out late at night that we don't see. We see their tracks more than we see them these days, and I'm okay with that.

With the Red River currently in flood stage (incomprehensible to me that we are seeing flooding again because we can go 10 years or more in between river floods but the last two years all we get are recurring floods), I expect we will see more wildlife because they've had to come up out of the bottomlands. Yesterday while working in the garden, a whitetail deer stood behind a cedar tree in our neighbor's pasture about 20' from my garden gate and carried on and had a fit trying to chase me away. It blew air out its nostrils, it paced, it stood and stared a hole through me. I just kept telling it to go away because it wasn't coming into the garden. Eventually it left, but it stayed around far too long. We wanted to live in an area with wildlife when we moved here, but in a lot of ways, we got a lot more than we bargained for. It's too late now. We aren't leaving.

Dawn

Dawn,

You have more patience than I do. I wonder what the next generation will do to control the wild critters. Humans continue to occupy more and more of the wild habitat.

Johnny

Johnny, You have to have patience because wildlife is very persistent. I was stalked by a deer once. If I walked north, it walked north with me, just on the other side of the road. If I walked south backwards, it walked south with me. I just went backwards slow and easy and never took my eyes off of it, and it never crossed the street and came too close. I was a nervous wreck by the time I was back to what I considered a safe place though. The most scared I've ever been was the 2 up-close cougar encounters, and if anything would have driven me back to being a city woman in Texas, that likely would have been it. Obviously I am still here in rural southern OK. It also is scary to have a feral pig suddenly appear. Even when there is a barbed wire fence between you and the pig, I always worry the pig will come through that fence.

Tonight we walked down after dinner to close and lock the driveway gate. It was about 5:30 pm and there was a skunk out in the bar ditch. Tim was yelling at it and throwing rocks at it to make it go away. lol. I was headed back up the driveway as fast as I could walk. I've never been skunked, but I've had to deal with skunked children and skunked dogs (2 kids, 2 dogs, all at the same time), and hope never to have to deal with that again. I was worried tonight that I was going to have a skunked husband, but the skunk ran across the road and into the neighbor's cow pasture.

It seems like it is always something, but today I also got to watch baby turtles the size of half dollars, and a lot of songbirds that were bathing in a puddle in the driveway in late afternoon, so a lot of the interactions with wildlife are positive ones.

Dawn

Dawn,

My life is better because of knowing you. Thanks for the encouragement.

Johnny

Johnny, What a sweet thing to say. Thank you. I hope you know that my life is better because of knowing you as well.

Dawn

Johnny Coleman,

There are a lot of things I don't understand, is there a reason for planting Dia de San Juan corn seed the 24 of June? This is interesting, just wondering. That seems kind of late for Oklahoma. Some years it is to hot and dry by that time.

authereray,

I have very little experience with it but last year I noticed that it would roll up its leaves and wait for rain and it never seemed to be affected by the heat. The husks are very tough and are unpleasant to touch. I wonder if that is why critters didn't bother it. I didn't see any sign of critter damage.

Here is a blurb from the place where I originally bought the seed.

"An all-purpose white Mexican june corn used for everything by the Mayo.
From north of Alamos, Sonora. Planted on the Dia de San Juan (June 24)
when Southwestern folks traditionally celebrate the coming of the summer
rains. Grows 10+ feet tall. Staff favorite for green corn tamales and
roasting corn." - Native Seeds/SEARCH

Johnny

Dawn,

My rain dance skills are minimal at best. (;-)

Well then, you need to work on that!