Fourth Corn Planting

My husband loves corn. I start in May and do five successions each about a week apart. I'm hoping the last succession will still be producing when my mom visits in late August. Sweet corn is one of her favorites. But the timing will be tight. I could plant it later, but I always do corn and squash together. We have raccoons in the area and they don't like walking through a field of prickly squash, so my corn is usually safe if I train the squash to grow under the corn. But I want the squash to have time to produce. I can't plant it much before the corn as then it would overwhelm the small plants. So mid June is about as late as things get planted up.

I'm on my fourth planting right now. It went into the baby Asian greens bed. On Monday I picked the last of the boc choy and mizuna. You see the outside leaves I trimmed off but didn't dispose of (I was hungry at the time). And all that was left to pick yesterday was the mizuna. Much of it was starting to bolt, so I wasn't too unhappy to see it go. I'm wondering where I could squeeze in a plant or two though.

The schedule said to plant the corn on June 7th, not June 9th. But it is easy to keep up even if you don't have time that day to plant. On June 7th I put the corn and squash into little covered bowls with some paper towel and some water. The corn and squash seeds had begun to send out little roots by the time I planted two days later.

This is going to be my mycorrhizal fungi experiment. On the northwest side of the bed the corn has been inoculated. But the southeast side has none. The spring experiment was a bust. Adding endomycorrhizae to the soil didn't improve the growth of lettuce or peas. But then it isn't supposed to do well in cool soil. You don't get warmer than in summertime, so this will tell me if it is worth the price to buy or if it is just a waste of money for me. For all I know I have plenty of these soil fungi already in my soil.

First succession

The other successions are up and doing well. I have one corn plant in the first succession that is struggling for some reason. And one of the two squash plants at the end of the bed damped off in May so it was replanted. That is smaller than its neighbor, but it will catch up.

Second

Third

The third one is barely out of the ground. The squash in that one isn't up yet. Now I have four of my successions done. I have just one left to go.