teeny tiny corn ears

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Hica Breezewood, PA(Zone 5b) Aug 16, 2007

Hello everyone, i just found this website and i'm so happy to have people to talk to about my gardening questions rather than searching for answers and waiting to try it again next year. sometimes experience matters more than what the books say ;)

My main question is about my sweet corn. This is the third year we've tried to grow it in our small backyard garden, and the first year, we got two ears of corn. enough to make my daughter happy, but i couldn't help but be disappointed. So, i read that i needed to plant more corn to help pollination, so we did that, lots of short rows of sugar dots corn. Last year we let smut ruin the crop since we had no idea what it was then, so we used different seeds this year, and no smut. But this year, we have plenty of ears, but it's all SUPER small ears. the longest one was about 5 inches, but the majority were about 3 inches long. it tasted wonderful, but i'm thinking we can get bigger ears that taste just as good if we know what to do. We've never tested our soil, so we just used a general vegetable fertilizer available at our local nursery.

Would i have to test the soil to find out what it needs more of, or is it something else like water or sun causing our mini corn to stay so small? any advice is welcome! :)

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Farmerdill Augusta, GA(Zone 8a) Aug 16, 2007

The two major reasons for small ears are 1. Cultivar and 2. spacing. Sugar Dots has a nice size ear, but I understood that you planted a different cultivar this ear. Some of the early cultivars are small. The richer the soil the closer spacing that you can use., but if you give it room you can get decent ears on very poor soil.

Post #3863488
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Hica Breezewood, PA(Zone 5b) Aug 16, 2007

ahhh, thank you! one of the drawbacks to letting the 4 year old put the seeds in the hole, she tends to be bad at judging spacing LOL luckily we planted enough rows for a few meals worth even with the smaller size,and still have the silver queen to harvest.

next year i'll definitely try spacing them out more and see how it works, thanks!

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