Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: LottyLouis on September 08, 2016, 18:24
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Hi all
I want to try the Three Sisters planting method next year and need a good, tall sweetcorn variety. I also want a non hybrid one - not being fussy and all! I've located a non hybrid one on a well-known seed company that specialises in non hybrids and advocates seed saving - not sure if I should name names here! I've asked them about the height of the variety but not had a response.
Can anyone recommend a non hybrid sweetcorn variety that grows to over 6ft ? And where to buy it?
Many thanks. :)
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Hi all
I want to try the Three Sisters planting method next year...
Good luck...
Personally I reckon that you'll get better yields from planting the three crops, optimally, in their own beds.
If you wan't a really tall variety of corn then you can see if you can get hold of some green maize from Central/Southern Africa - say Zama Star from South Africa,but this won't be a'sweet' corn, and it will be touch and go as to cropping as these tall varieties have a longer growing season than our domestic varieties - mine grow to over 12 ft in three months (if you PM me I could probably spare some) but then the growing conditions, irrigation, fertilisation programme etc need to be absolutely spot on. For example you'll want to split your applied nitrogen 40:20:20:20 - ie 40% at planting then 20% at knee high stage and two further applications of 20% at two week intervals - this is way more than a few beans will provide.
Now I often run squash through my maize (the beans thing is a waste of time in my opinion), but the tall varieties of corn shade out so much light that the squash suffers which has been my experience this year.
Anyway I've been experimenting with tall varieties of corn for the last 14 years or so and still haven't had a crop,although I do think that if September stays warm I could be in luck this year.
For pictures of my current crop serch under 'mielies':
http://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=124034.msg1457378#msg1457378
These plants now have fertilised cobs, up to four per plant, but have not developed enough for harvesting. Planting is 50cm between plants and 1m between rows. This amount af growth and planting density takes a LOT of nitrogen to produce.
Philip