Watch my Corn Pop up in Rows

Tim McGraw sings a country song with the following lyrics:

I'm gonna live where the green grass grows,

Watchin' my corn pop up in rows,

Every night be tucked in close to you.

Raise our kids where the Good Lord's blessed

Point our rocking chairs towards the west,

Plant our dreams where the peaceful river flows

Where the green grass grows.

I like the message of that song.  Yesterday afternoon I put the cows into a temporary paddock that I had set up in the yard and I strolled over to check on the progress of our sweet corn.  It has been pretty dry for the past few weeks, so I've been using the water hose to water the corn every afternoon.  When watering day before yesterday, I noticed some green shots.  As the water moistened the soil, you could almost watch the corn grow!

Let's check it out.  We have two long rows planted and as you can see, they are indeed popping up in rows now:

Healthy young corn

The bright green growth against the dull shades of the dirt and hay really stands out. This variety is called Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn.  The Sustainable Seed Company (www.sustainableseedco.com) website tells an interesting story about this variety:

Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn was originally developed by Nathaniel Newman Stowell of Burlington, New Jersey in 1848.  Stowell was a farmer and spent some years refining this variety, which he developed by crossing Menomony Soft Corn and Northern Sugar Corn.

In the fall of 1855, he sold just two ears of seed corn to a close friend for four dollars, on the agreement that the seed was for personal use only. Stowell's "friend" then re-sold the same seed for a whopping $20,000 to Thoburn and Company who released the variety commercially in late 1856.This delicious white sweet corn is regarded as the "King of All White Sweet Corn Varieties", has been popular for over 162 years.   Stowell's Evergreen matures slowly over a long period, extending the usual harvest and produces 9 inch ears with 16 to 20 rows of plump, sweet white kernels.

One of the things I learned from that is that Mr. Stowell should've picked his friends better.  For some reason that reminded me of a funny quote, "You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose." Off topic, I know.  Back on point, his friend was not a true friend and one might surmise that Mr. Stowell was more proficient in identifying good seed than good friends.

Sweet Corn Sprouting

This variety matures in about 100 days and will make a couple (or three) ears per stalk.  The stalks will grow up to twelve feet tall.  From past experience, this is the troubling thing.  We had a thunderstorm blow through last year that was accompanied by rains and strong straight line winds.  It knocked our corn flat on the ground.  You can read about that debacle by clicking here: Falling Flat

You live and you learn.  This year with two long rows, as the corn gets taller I'm going to put T posts around it and build a fence around it to provide support.  If the corn falls down before it tassels, the pollen won't be able to fall on the corn silk and fertilize it and you'll have blank rows of corn.  That's a valuable lesson I learned last year.

Below you can see the cows eating grass in the yard around the hay-mulched rows of corn.

Corn & Cows

Obviously as the corn gets bigger there's no way I'm trusting a single strand of wire to keep the cows away from the delicious cornstalks!

Once we've harvested the ears of corn, we always feed the stalks to the cows.  They absolutely LOVE them.  We absolutely LOVE eating the sweet corn.  In about 90 days, we'll do just that!