I planted my sweet corn two weeks ago, and they are coming up. We have the possibility of frost coming in a couple days. Will the frost kill my corn plants? Should I cover them?
Will my corn freeze?
I would protect my corn from frost. It seems you are getting a late frost this year!
Depending on the age of the corn and the depth of the frost it may not cause any real damage.
But if it were my corn, I'd probably it anyway.
I planted some of my corn out and it did get frost, and the leaves got it bad. I cut off the frozen leaves and stalks and the corn is growing out of the area where I cut it. The leaves are very tender and can freeze easily. I had it covered with a sheet, even, and it still froze, but some milk jugs of water would have prevented that, I think, in retrospect. So far so good, though. It freezes until June 15 here, sometimes. The days are fair but still getting pretty cold at night.
Corn will freeze, the only issue is how deeply it freezes. If it is cold enough, long enough, the freeze will reach the growth point of the corn. If it does that, the plant is dead. If not, it will grow new leaves. Ask me how I know? I had a bunch freeze a couple of years ago. Here are some pictures of the extracted seedlings. The first photo shows the whole plant. You can clearly see the damaged leaves. The second photo is a cross section of the plant with a razor. It doesn't look like the growth point (coleoptile) in this plant is damaged badly, but there is enough to keep it from growing. The final diagram is from a Pioneer seed webpage. It shows the major parts of the seedling.
The pioneer page has a detailed paper about adding starter fertilizer for corn (geared toward commercial growers). It has some other general information that would be interesting to any corn grower.
Edited because I forgot to add the link!
https://www.pioneer.com/home/site/us/agronomy/library/template.CONTENT/guid.B9124F8E-23D4-230C-421D-F99754E7BA20
David
This message was edited May 14, 2013 7:03 AM
Such strange weather!