The corn turned out better than I expected and every week I've been watching it as it matured and now as it dries.
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| The leaves are starting to die on the corn plants, but still very green |
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| the tips of two ears; top one a bit drier than the bottom |
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| No sign of the black layer yet |
The combine is working; greased and oiled and charged up. the corn head is welded up and ready to go; I'm hooking up the grain drier this week so that I can dry the corn down to something that will keep very well - I'd like to be able to feed this corn to my pigs for the next year.
And I should probably start thinking about putting aside some of this crop for the seed corn for next year. I've been pretty pleased with it; it's open-pollinated organic corn; so unlike hybrids should be pretty similar next year. Plus it's a heck of a lot cheaper to put up my own seed than buy it again. Seed corn is expensive.
What variety of OP corn did you plant?
ReplyDeleteI've been growing small plots of Minnesota 13 (87 day) OP corn for a number of years trying to convince myself that I could grow it on a larger far-scale. My thought has always been that I'd need something like a 87-day variety to avoid the heat of late summer that's common here, but a shorter season variety might also be what you need to get enough degree-days to reach maturity earlier in the fall.
FWIW, I always bought my OP corn seed from: http://openpollinated.com/
They sell a few different varieties and always seemed reasonably priced.