Thinking About Corn

What a difference a couple of days and a good, steady rain make!  The picture on top was taken last Friday.  A few little snow pea sprouts and that's about it.  Saturday night, we had a nice rain that just drenched everything.  The picture below was taken today.  Not only did more snow peas show up but the corn made an appearance too!  All in the space of may-be 48 hours. 

Everything else is coming up, too.  So the garden is off to a good start, I think.  It's a little patchy but hopefully it will fill in, it's still early yet.  But it’s the corn that's been on my mind lately.  A couple of years ago, I had trouble with critters raiding the corn after planting it.  They ate all the seeds and I had to re-plant.  Corn was slow that year because of it.  So I put up Dolly and I started covering the corn with plastic at night.  That seemed to do the trick.  Last year the corn came up first planting.  I thought it curious, though.  I never had trouble with critters in the corn before.  And then, after planting this year, it hit me...

Two years ago, I had read that it was wiser to plant the corn ahead of the snow peas.  It made sense to me; I had struggled to keep the snow peas from over-running the corn.  In a few weeks it worked out, the corn out-grew the snow peas quickly and became trellises for the snow peas.  But I figured I'd try planting the corn first and waiting to put the snow peas in.  That's when the corn seeds got raided.  This year I decided to go back to my old method of planting the corn and snow peas at the same time.  I didn't like waiting to plant the snow peas because they are an early plant vegetable and they do well in cooler weather.  I was also thinking may-be that was why the snow pea harvest wasn't as good as it had been previously.

I also didn't cover the corn with plastic at night this year. Simply because the plastic sheets I was using sort of disintegrated over the winter and I hadn't replaced them yet. And TAH-DA!!!!! No raiding of the corn! I checked every morning and the corn rows were pristine; no little scratch marks, no disturbed earth. And the corn is coming up in a timely manner and abundantly.

So now I'm thinking that there might be another benefit to planting snow peas and corn together. I think may-be the peas act as camouflage for the corn and the critters stay away. Took me two years to figure it out. What's that saying about not seeing the forest for the trees?

Dolly's New Duds

It's been a busy few weeks with getting the garden prepped, then ready, then adding compost, then making rows and then trying to figure out where to put the DaM plants and seeds. It seems I run out of space faster each year. Which is odd considering I'm only feeding two (humans, not going to get into the animals, figuring that out would take forever) instead of four. Mind you, the kids come home from university fairly regularly and I tend to ply them with food to take home so that could have something to do with it.  Running out of space and running out of time pretty much marks this time of year for me.

Thankfully, the busy time is winding down from a Cat.5 Hurricane to a little dirt devil. It's manageable; I can actually do everything I plan to do in a day now. So I decided to have a little fun and kill half an hour by giving Dolly a makeover. She changes every year, as I add and take away things that get worn, lost or taken.  The big changes this year are eyes instead of sunglasses and stuffed blue hands instead of floppy white ones.  Last year her picture ended up in our local newspaper with the caption of being "unique".  I'm glad I took the time and had a little fun, now I'll have someone to talk to while I'm weeding in the garden.  Oh, and of course, any resemblance to fictional or real characters is not intended and purely coincidental.