Nature's Way

Nature has Superheroes and Villians. The Villians are the insects that munch on your plants, ruining all your hard work. The Superheroes are the insects that help the plants grow, and help keep the Villians away.

On the left is a picture of our great-grandmother, Alice Rose's, Peonies. Peonies are a big double-petal flower that smells really great. Prior to the buds opening we have noticed that ants are busy crawling all over them. You can see them better in the picture below:

We thought at first that the ants were hurting the Peonies, but we have since learned that they're not Villians. They are Superheroes. Their job is to collect the sweet juice on the buds, perhaps helping them to open. Once the buds bloom most of the ants will go away.

What does this have to do with corn? We'll be using Superhero insects to help keep our garden organic. Once we know how much space our corn garden will take up we'll do some more math to figure out how many ladybugs we'll need. And no, not all ladybugs are girl bugs.

Sprouting Encouragement

Today our school science teacher, Mrs. Zea Mays, pulled up our blog, Cornnecticut Cornversation, and showed our classes using the "Smart Board."  (A "Smart Board" is a big white board much like a really huge TV screen.  You can write on it like a grease board using special markers.)  We thought it was really cool that she did that -- and that a lot of our classmates expressed an interest in having their own garden.  If they do, they'll learn it's a lot of work at first, but then, if you keep tending to it, it gets easier AND you get to eat the "fruits of your labor."  (Our Pop likes that line!)

The funniest part of Mrs. Zea Mays showing our classes our blog was when she asked about one type of corn: Was that Blood Axe Man?  No!  It was Bloody Butcher!  Our classmates thought that is a weird name for corn, and some asked if they could see it.  So we will try to put together a little display that shows all the seeds, along with their normal and weird names.  By the way, Zea Mays is a type of corn too!  That's not really our science teacher's name, but we figure if everyone else gets a name related to corn then so should she!  We hope she likes it!  :)

And speaking of sprouting, look!  Stowell's Evergreen was the first to start sprouting!  It's fun looking after our baby seeds, but sometimes we worry.  Last night we came close to having a frost which could kill them.  We're glad they're OK and hope warmer days -- and nights -- are on their way!

Not so Permanent

We ran into a problem with our newly planted corn seeds.  Rain.

We had written, with permanent marker, the names of each seed we planted in the Chinese take-out containers.  The ink wasn't so permanent.  Yesterday's rain washed it off.

Of the 14 seed varieties we planted, we can only correctly identify 9.  This is because Mom had written on the sides of the containers.  The other containers have no writing on the sides.  This means we need to disturb the seeds and study them.  Our question now is can we correctly identify them?  If not, we will need to replant five varieties.

Corn-y Lessons

Since the AOL hit counter wouldn't work, Mom added a hit counter that would.  She used one from "Stat Counter" and it shows us where in the world our visitors are from:

We had fun looking at the different places around the world.  Thank you for visiting with us and making our corn adventure more fun!

Mom said that at one time, in various parts around the world, the word "corn" was used to describe a location or building that was holding the largest harvest of the season.  It didn't matter what the crop being stored was, it could have been something like wheat, it was still called corn.  Then, when people started growing maize here in America, they built buildings to hold the maize harvests.  That's when the name "corn" stuck.  Today the buildings that hold the corn here in Amercia are called "Corn Cribs." 

If you google the name "Corn Cribs" and click onto images, you'll see lots of different ones.

Ears to the Weather: Planting

We are learning a lot about recycling through our school.  So when we ran out of space in the greenhouse containers our Mom & Pop bought for our Cornnecticut experiment we had to go to Plan B.  Chinese take-out.  The containers that is!

We ended up planting 14 varieties of corn that take over 100 days to grow. So far we planted:

Plant Hart's Ornamental Indian Maize

Heirloom's Squaw Corn

Heirloom's Indian Corn

Heirloom's Truckers White Corn

Heirloom's Truckers Yellow Corn

Heirloom's South American Yellow

Heirloom's  Broom Corn

Heirloom's Broom Corn, Multi-color

Heirloom's Bloody Butcher Corn

Heirloom's Hickory King Corn

Heirloom's Stowell's Evergreen Corn

Three kinds were popcorn:

Heirloom's Japanese Hulless Popcorn

Heirloom's Lady Finger Popcorn

Heirloom's Strawberry Popcorn

Ears to the Weather: Planning

The Kernel joined us for a Chinese dinner last night.  That was when he broke the bad news to us.  The tiller cannot be fixed, and it is too expensive to replace.  This means we will not be able to use a full 1/4 acre as we planned.

More bad news.  Well, not really.  But it does change our project a little:  Mom & Pop went shopping at Lowes and found us another packet of seeds.  It's called "Ruby Corn."  If we plant all the packet of seeds we have now, that would make it 26! 

Nine of our packets take over 100 days to grow, so we will plant them this weekend in little starter kits Mom & Pop picked up at the store.  We decided we will use the starter kits because the weather has not been so cooperative!  Cold one day, warm the next.  (We learned that the ground needs to be a constant 50 degrees to allow the seeds to germinate.)   Plus, this will give us a chance to figure out our math.  We'll need to know exactly how much space we can assign to each type of corn.  Let's hope Mom & Pop don't find any more corn seeds!  Even our Nana, Sweet Ears, is suggesting we locate more seeds -- especially those mini-cobs of corn often found in Chinese food!  That would make 27 types! 

More Seeds

Our special order of seeds from Heirloom Seeds arrived in today's mail.  We're quite excited.  Mom said she will take a picture for us of all the packets tomorrow.

To keep our experiment as scientific as possible we decided to create a spreadsheet on Excel.  We have the name of the corn, the days until harvest, how much the seeds cost, how far they are to be planted, and more.  We even plan on counting how many seeds come in each packet!

One of the interesting things we read on the planting instructions on some of the seed packets is that they recommend planting the seeds in circles -- they call the circles "hills." This sounds very familiar!  We learned about how the Pequot Indians used to plant their corn when we visited the Pequot Museum last year.  We had also learned that the Pequot's planted beans and squash with their corn to discourage weeds, so we might include doing this with the corn that suggests planting it in circles. 

Resources

We went to our local library and asked the librarians for their help in finding good resource books on corn.  They found two titles which we borrowed.

The first one is called "Grow the Best Corn" by Nancy Bubel, published in 1981.  It's a small book but it has a lot of interesting information.

The second book is called, "The Story of Corn," by Betty Fussell, published in 1992.  It has a lot more information in it, including myths, history, and more.  It will take awhile to read it.

Hopefully both of these books will help us have a great crop!  If you click onto the books it will lead to Amazon where you can peek inside and see what they're about.

One of the cool parts from the first book talks about the pests, like corn earworms, corn rootworms and the corn borer.  Although we grew some corn in our garden last year, we don't recall seeing any of these pests.  We wonder if it's because we used lady bugs and praying mantises to help control pests.

Seeds

The tiller stopped working yesterday.  The Kernel says he needs to look into getting it fixed or maybe replaced.  We're not sure how long that will take.

We walked the length of the tilled area.  It was 79 steps.  We figure that would be about 35 feet.  We need much more area tilled.

We have already started collecting corn seeds.  We got these at local stores:



The Halas Garden center was the most helpful.  We went there because our science teacher had the owner as a student long ago.  She was right; he is a nice man.  He gave us four of the seed packets above.  We got the others from another garden center and from Target.  More seeds should arrive any day.

Getting Ready

Part of the job of having a big corn garden is getting the soil ready.  Kernel Husks, our grandpa, is letting us use his tractor to till the land.

We found a lot of  wood chuck holes.  Wood chucks like to burrow into the ground to make their homes.  This keeps them safe from preditors.  Unfortunately, since they like gardens we have to evict them.  The Kernel has us throwing moth balls down the holes.  he says they don't like the smell and will move to some place else.  We hope they move soon.

The Plan

Last year my sister and I had our first vegetable garden.  We grew tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, lettuce, squash, zucchini, green beans, broccoli, cucumbers, rhubarb, and corn.

Our favorite was the corn!

Last month we decided we want another garden.  We still want to use the same garden that we used last year, but for our plans this year, it's too small.  We have our parents OKay to use 1/4 of an acre to attempt to grow over 25 different varieties of corn and decide which grows best in Connecticut.  This is where we will track our progress.