Confused corn

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Ah my poor corn plants. They have been making good progress – just look at how fast the plants have grown in about two weeks!

The mini corn plantation looks rather busy, doesn’t it?

However, they have been struggling with the challenges the weather has been throwing at them. Excessive rain has encouraged the plants to start doing that famous 45-degree lean in Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal performances, and I have been busy constantly propping them back up.

The rain has also flattened or eroded the soil, so I’ve had to top that up as well, to cover up the exposed roots.

Red roots for red corn…

I know that this is supposed to be the most rainy part of the year for us, and boy have we had some torrential downpours over the last weeks! Instead of following the pattern of rain for a couple of days and shine for a couple of days, the weather has been sunny and hot in the mornings before dark, thundery clouds roll in in the afternoons – but those clouds don’t always deliver rain. There may be none, some, or a LOT of rain – and so the poor plants have been trying to cope.

I’m going to call these premature tassels, because the plants they’re on are small, and none of the other plants have started showing silks yet. Such a waste!

It’s no wonder then that a few of the corn plants have already started tasseling. Mind you, these are the smaller plants that are just below a metre high. The stronger plants are still growing, but don’t have any signs of tassels or silks. Sigh. This is starting to feel like corn deja vu…

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.

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Winter comma

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This would have been a beautiful winter melon, had it developed properly. See how nice and healthy the top of it looks? Instead, here it is masquerading as a comma.

Our winter melon seems more interested in looking like a punctuation mark than a fruit. For whatever reason, while the melon has kept growing, the bottom tip started turning yellow, and been shriveling up more and more. It looks like we have to harvest it now to try to save part of the melon. :(

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Keeping the long bean plants going…

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Fresh from the pod, this long bean seed was planted immediately.

Remember my poor long bean plant that was attacked by a caterpillar? Well, all those forming beans didn’t quite make it to adulthood (read: the cooking pot). We harvested a few early, but the smaller ones had quite a struggle to grow bigger, and that’s when the plant’s survival instinct kicked in.

Instead of growing the beans bigger, the plant focused its energy on producing as many seeds as it could. It was a little sad to see the scrawny beans on the plant, but I waited until the skin was thinner and the seeds were bulky before plucking the beans to harvest seeds.

I’ve never planted seeds from freshly plucked beans, and I was happy to see them germinate within 2 to 7 days. So, the next generation is on the way …if the snails leave them alive long enough!

The little forest of new long bean plants.

The main plant is still hanging around. It still looks quite pathetic as I pruned away the stems that didn’t look good, and is left with one very long stem that still has some leaves on it. I’m not sure if it will recover, but it’s in such pathetic condition that it doesn’t warrant a picture right now. :(

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Mini corn plantation in the making

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When I first started growing corn a couple of years ago, I had only four or so plants. Along the way, I read that of all veggies, corn needs to be grown in a cluster, to increase the chances of pollination. I fully intended to do that on my next attempt, except that I encountered so many issues with that first try that I decided to move on to other veggies.

Now that I have my little “club” of veggie-growing buddies, and because we tend to share excess seeds with each other (really, who’s going to plant 20 or 40 of the same plant in one or two growing seasons?), I had in my possession some really fresh-looking Red Aztec corn seeds that just begged to be planted. So I sowed the seeds and planted my corn bed – because I was going to learn from my earlier mistakes.

They have been growing, and here are our Red Aztec corn plants, just over a month old:

Here’s the Red Aztec corn family all clustered together. Methinks me went overboard crowding them like this, because some are overpowering the others. It looks like some culling will be necessary.

I admit that I transplanted the initial seedlings a little late, because they seemed to take a long time to acclimatize to the new bed. So, I decided to sow a few more seeds that I added to the bed as soon as they had sprouted. They grew fast and caught up with the other plants within two weeks. So, my lesson re-learned is that fast-growing plants have to be either direct-sown or transplanted before the tap root gets too long.

I think this is a lesson I’ll likely fail repeatedly, because I either procrastinate or don’t have time. :(

Anyway, the corn is busily growing, and I hope we will have a decent harvest eventually.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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