Persistence; A Gardener's Best Attribute

Things don't always go as planned in the garden. This is particularly noticeable in the vegetable garden since the goal with each plant is to produce food. If the food is never eaten, that particular planting failed. Problems can range from weather issues to plant disease to pest damage. That is my common problem. Last year, a groundhog ate practically everything. What he didn't destroy the raccoons got.

What can a gardener do about these problems? Be persistent!

Growing corn has been an area where I have needed persistence for years. Raccoons have been my Nemesis here. Last year I devised a plan to beat them but when it came time to build my fence, I failed to get it done.

This year I vowed to build that fence and started the corn in soil blocks indoors. Things were progressing well until it came time to harden them off. I took the two trays of my Bicolor Mirai Corn soil block seedlings outside. All was well until we received the biggest downpour in history! It rained three inches in a hour and the soil blocks were ruined!

Instead of soil blocks, I now had a tray of soupy soil with corn plants jutting out of it. It would be impossible to separate the corn plants without severely disturbing the roots. To make matters worse, I was behind schedule on my garden expansion. I didn't even have the corn area ready for planting yet.

Instead of giving up and throwing the trays out, I decided to once again be persistent. I quickly built a new raised bed, let the corn trays dry out, did my best to separate the corn plants, planted them in the new bed and crossed my fingers.

To my surprise, they are now doing great!

Don't they look great? Oh but I still haven't built the fence and I can see the raccoons watching from the edge of the yard rubbing their little paws together in anticipation. What can I do now?

Building a fence would still be a good idea, but I may be able to get by with a little help from my friends at Contech. I now have a Contech Scarecrow that will be able to guard my precious Mirai Corn when it matures.

This is a really neat product. It is a high powered water sprayer with a sensor that detects when animals come near. Just when the hungry raccoon has its eyes on my corn it will get zapped with a noisy blast of water! I'm sure it will work great. I've already tried it out on my children and I got pretty wet setting it up too.

I will write an entire post about it soon since it is such a cool garden gadget. I sure hope it helps me finally get some good home grown corn.

Persistence is the name of the game.

Soil Blocks to the Rescue!

We haven't had much rain in the past month so it has been pretty difficult to get new seeds planted out in the garden to germinate. I have had to water the bush bean area everyday to keep the top of the soil from crusting over. On days that I miss, the top layer of the soil dries out and the seeds can't break through. While dealing with this frustration I got to thinking, there has to be a better way.

What about my soil block maker?!

Beans and corn are two vegetables not usually grown indoors and transplanted because they have very delicate roots that don't take well to transplanting. Squeezing the seedlings out of a cell pack or wrestling them out of pots can be harmful to them. With soil blocks the transplant shock should be minimal or nonexistent!

A week or so ago I set out making blocks and planting seeds for my pole beans and my Mirai 301BC corn.

If you don't know what a soil block is, I wrote about them earlier this year. I got mine from Johnny's Selected Seeds. If you want to know more about soil block makers, Johnny's has a great PDF file explaining them better. Also, Jason, who has commented on this blog before, has a whole website devoted to soil blocks. He calls them potting blocks and his site is pottingblocks.com.

What will make soil blocks great for beans and corn is that there are no pots to remove, so the roots won't be disturbed. I can gently place the block in a small hole the garden and cover up around the block with garden soil.

The major difference in dealing with soil blocks under lights is the way you water them. As I have stated before, I am a big fan of bottom watering seedlings under grow lights. With the blocks, you have to spray from above daily to assure that the blocks don't dry out. After the plant roots have taken over the block, you can then lightly pour water into the block.

Here are the pole been seeds popping through the soil block:

Every seed germinated since I have better control over their conditions than if planted directly outside.

Here are the baby corn sprouts poking through on their first day:

What makes corn so difficult to grow indoors is that the taproots grow very quickly. Look at it sticking out of the soil block on day two after germinating!

These corn plants are already outside hardening off and will go into the garden very soon. The key is to transplant them only about a week after they sprout inside in the soil block.

So there you have it - soil blocks to the rescue with guaranteed germination. This morning the McCaslan pole beans were transplanted into the garden and the corn and other pole beans are waiting for tonight. Living in Kentucky, I have to grow Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans of course. My third pole bean variety is the crazy Chinese Red Noodle Bean that grows 18" pods! More on that later....

Corn Hole; Have you ever heard of it or played it?

Part of Wordless Wednesday

Once again, I can't really leave this completely wordless. My daughter and I played in a Corn Hole tournament at our church on Sunday. We won the first round but lost the 2nd round 21 to 19. I know this has very little to do with gardening, although there really is corn inside the bean bags. Even still, this post will not be worthy of Veggie Garden Info.

Corn Hole is a really fun game, but I don't think it is very well known across the country. It is extremely popular in the Cincinnati area, as you can see from the above pictures. It is sort of like horseshoes. You try to throw your corn bags into the hole in the board thirty feet away. If you get it in the hole, you get three points. If it lands on and stays on the board, you get one point. It is played in two people teams. Your partner is at the other board and throws the bags back to your board. The scoring gets pretty interesting because the other team's points cancel out yours on any given round. In other words, on your first round if you get one in the hole and then your opponant does too, the score is still 0 to 0, not 3 to 3.

There is a regulation size and angle to the boards, but the cool thing is that the face of the boards can be painted however you want. Some of them get really artistic.

Well now, there is a good garden-related board!

What I am interested to see from this post is if you have ever played corn hole? Have you even heard of it? Please leave a comment below and tell me where you live and if you have heard of it or played it. If you havn't but you are interested in learning more, you can visit www.playcornhole.org.

Once again, thanks for allowing me to be so wordy on Wordless Wednesday! If you want to see other people's posts that probably are less wordy, click here.

Raccoons will torment me No More!

The Raccoons that visit my garden tend to talk to me.

As you can see, this one informed me that he was getting tired of his diet of cat food and is longing for another summertime feast of my sweet corn! To that I say NOT THIS YEAR MR. RACCOON!

Every year I attempt to grow a small patch of corn, and every year I get to watch the stalks grow healthy and strong. I also get to watch many wonderful ears develop, but when its just about time to pick those succulent sweet ears ... the local raccoons have a night corn eating garden party! They take every last ear and scatter the cobs all around the yard!

This year the only corn they will get is the few kernels left on the cobs that they find on top of the compost pile! The corn I plan to grow is Bicolor Mirai 301BC which I wrote about in a previous post. The coons won't get any Mirai corn from the garden because number three on my 2007 to do list is to build a raccoon proof fence around that corn! I can't afford to fence in the entire garden, so I am just fencing in the center of the garden and I will grow the corn inside the fence.

"But raccoons can climb a fence" you might be thinking. I'm going to do three things to combat this. First I will make the pumpkin patch but up against one side of the fence (the one furthest from the house and closest to the woods). Raccoons hate trying to get through and over pumpkin vines. Second, I will grow cucumbers ON the fence. According to Carrots Love Tomatoes, raccoons detest cucumbers, so they probably won't try to climb over them. If they remember how much fun they've had at their annual corn eating party and are determined to not let this companion planting bother them, I think my third trick will stop them.

I found a raccoon remedy in another one of my favorite books called Jeff Cox's 100 Greatest Garden Ideas: Tips, Techniques, and Projects for a Bountiful Garden and a Beautiful Backyard. One of the 100 great ideas shows how to securely attach the bottom of a roll of chicken wire to the top of the fence and leave the top of the chicken wire unsupported. You also bend the chicken wire out a little and leave it floppy. If a raccoon reaches the top of the fence and begins climbing on the chicken wire, his weight will cause the chicken wire to fold down on him and dump him off.

Brilliant!

I will post plenty of pictures after I get the fence built. I will also report what my raccoon friends have to say about it! Of course they may take their revenge by convincing their deer friends to jump over the fence, but that is material for another post!

So there you have it - number three on my 2007 Garden to do list!

The Corn That Everyone's Talking About!

"The Corn That Everyone's Talking About!" That's what Park Seed Co. says about its Bicolor Mirai 301BC seed. Park claims that this is the sweetest tasting and most tender corn EVER grown. So I ask you, has anyone heard of this before?

I know, I know, every seed company claims that every variety is the best. I've even seen some companies claim that two or more varieties of a certain vegetable that they offer are the best. We all know there can only be one "best". We also know that nobody can prove that a variety is truly the best, so it is a pretty loose claim. Nonetheless, the discription of Mirai 301 originally from Japan intrigued me enough that I bought some. Look at some of the quotes below, taken from their description:

"This gourmet corn is requested by 5-star restaurants . . . as well as by anyone who has ever tasted it!"

"These ears are 7 to 8 inches long, with good "tip fill" (meaning that the kernels stay plump and delicious all the way to the end of the ear instead of petering out!) and excellent coverage by dark green husks. Once picked, the ears last up to 6 weeks if refrigerated! (But you'll eat every last one LONG before then!) The 7-foot plants are very, very heavy-yielding, quite tolerant of stress, and show good resistance to Stewart's Wilt and common rust."

Park's Director of Seeds, Stephanie Turner, is quoted as saying "I have never tasted anything like it in my life" and "I sampled it raw in the field, and it was all I could do not to eat the entire cob!"

So, will it live up to the hype? I was sold on it so much that I plan to put up an 8 foot fence around it to hopefully keep the Deer and Racoons out. If nothing else, it will give me plenty of material to blog about this spring/summer.

The seeds arrived in the mail the other day. Anxiously I opened the envelope to see this miracle corn and here it is:

Could this be the beginning of a new "favorite"? Is everyone really talking about it? If not, will they be after I grow it this season?! Stay tuned and find out! Same Bat Blog, Same Bat Garden!

Let Your Kids Help in The Garden

It is a great idea to let your children help you in the garden. I used to be a perfectionist and resist the help of a little one because things would not be done exactly right. Now I see that it is worth losing a seedling or two to have your children by your side in the garden. Even if they only help in small ways, they begin to understand how plants grow. They get to be part of something bigger than themselves. They marval at God's workmanship in every step.

So far, my daughters have been able to enjoy watching broccoli, lettuce and peas grow from seed to harvest. As for the tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, beans and everything else, they now want to check on the progress almost daily and notice even small changes in growth. Because of my girls, we have planted more vegetables than I originally planned. Every time they want to plant something new, we find a little more space. They recently planted corn and green beans.

I know it is kind of late in the year to be sowing seeds, but as long as we don't have a very early frost, they will make it. This weekend they will be planting pumpkins and gourds. We don't really have enough room in the garden for such space hogs, but by being a little creative I think we can manage. I will save the details for a future post.

The bottom line is that gardening is a great family activity. Our family is having a great time and learning a lot together. If you have a garden of any kind, I encourage you to involve your children in the tasks needed. As long as you can get them to see it as fun as well as work, they will want to visit the garden again and again!