jacoblockcuff, Your Grandparents must have amazing soil. They apparently don't live where it gets hot & dry conditions.

They DO have amazing soil. It's had cow manure, wood ash, lime, etc., piled on it year after year for almost 20 years now. Our native soil is extremely rocky, but they've removed most of their rocks working it so much.

And it does get pretty hot here, upper south, and can be dry at times. But our definition of dry could be different from yours, being as that we live in an area that gets 50+ inches of rain per year on average.

Do you know what corn variety they planted? I plant Ambrosia se, about 12-14" apart on average to get good sized ears.

Veggie king, my grandmother says she does not remember what variety it was. I may need to ask my grandpa (My grandma has been experiencing very bad memory loss since what we think was a stroke a few months back.) when I can catch him. He would probably know. I do know it was a fairly early, smaller corn variety. They planted late April, harvested all of it by the beginning of July. Unfortunately I never snapped a picture. We will be back up in a couple weeks and I will try to report back with some pictures.

Next year I do plan to grow some sweet corn. I definitely don't think my soil is developed enough to as close a spacing as 3". However, I do find that smaller ears are more ideal for us, being that we usually only eat maybe half of a big ear per person in a sitting. I'm thinking 6" spacing in rows with 30" wide rows. I'll probably go with slightly later variety, Stowell's Evergreen maybe. I've had success with that spaced 8-12" apart in all directions before.