Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: smellykipper on May 17, 2014, 20:03
-
i have grown my corn in pots in the pt that are now4 inches tall, im planting them out on the allotment, would you put anything over them once planting to protect them from pests ?
SK
-
Have they been hardened off?
Pest-wise they tend to be left alone on my plot - the slugs would rather eat other stuff ;)
-
I dont cover or protect them at all..
-
I read that you should cover them with plastic bottles and when they poke through the top of the bottle neck take the covers off. I had an absolutely brilliant crop when I did this. So will be doing it again for sure :D
-
I run a makeshift fence of bamboo canes and netting round mine as they grow. We have deer on the plot and they are very partial to corn cobs. They don't like pushing their faces into netting, so this is enough.
Other than that, I don't find pests a problem :)
-
I will be netting mine this year as tgey were attacket by pigeons on my first attempt last year and it set them back quite a bit.
-
Only problem we have with corn is the badger ::) they now have large cages sat over them which seems to have worked so far.
-
Sweet corn is a relatively recent introduction to the UK and as such hasn't been around long enough to attract its own set of pests and diseases - I would expect slugs, snails and possibly pigeons to be a potential problem for corn sown directly into the soil, but the only problem I've had with young plants is one year when a young cat chomped the tops off a couple of them, presumably thinking it was grass, but luckily they did recover.
If there were any deer or badgers around I would no doubt be thinking differently about it, and I sometimes fear for the cobs when I see grey squirrels darting about because some people have lost them that way - I suspect it's a source of food they have to learn about, and my local ones haven't so far.......... :unsure:
-
We planted our sweet corn out last week as they were about a foot high, then crisscrossed some twine between them attached to some stakes for support then wrapped a layer of fleece around the whole square to protect from the sometimes severe wind we get across our plot. The fleece will come down once they are a bit bigger and rooted well.