A-Maize-ing Corn

As mentioned previously, one of the sweetcorn is overtaking all the others in terms of height and growth. I noticed with excitement that the silks are now about 6cms long and a lovely bright green colour.

ONE ABOVE ALL OTHERS

According to a video I watched on YouTube on pollinating corn - which was hilarious as it was informative - the corn in my garden is still in its early stages. The silks and tassels need to be a goldeny yellow colour before they are mature enough to "mate". Or do what plants do.

As I can't seem to find the link to the corn video on YouTube, search "corn pollination" or the video's producer "TRYtoHELPyou" on the site. He offers very easy, direct instructions on how to hand pollinate ears of corn. So simple it's mind-boggling. The end credits are amusing too.

But basically what I have read and learned about corn is that the pointy bits on top are the male "tassels" which produce pollen with which to fertilise the female "silks", scientifically known as elongated stigmas. The proper name for corn is maize, and its scientific name is Zea mays.

In order to hand pollinate your corn (usually the job of wind or breezes) run your fingers along the horizontal stems of the male tassels to gather the pollen. Then merely sprinkle as much of the pollen onto the awaiting silks. The aim of pollination is to form kernels on your ears of corn. An unfertilised ear of corn looks kinda like a baby sweetcorn you find in stir-frys. Just a conical shape with tiny bumps without lovely rounded yellow kernels to complete the picture.

Once fertilisation takes place, the all-important kernels will begin to form on the ear of corn. You know pollination has been successful when the silks turn brown and start clumping together. The picture below was taken about 2 weeks after the silks started showed.

FERTILISED CORN

Fruit of Dragon

Now there's an unusual name for a fruit. For such an exciting sounding name, the taste of the dragonfruit is somewhat... bland. Its outer appearance however is, one supposes, from where the fruit derives its name. Dragonfruits have a fleshy, deep pink outer skin, tinged with emerald green. The plant on which it grows resembles a cactus, with thorny clusters which makes removing them from pots to plant inground slightly challenging.

Today, I did just that, to one such dragonfruit plant. We bought it from a local home nursery, just around the back laneway from our home. At the same time, we also bought a Ceylon spinach and sweet mint. The lovely lady who runs the nursery also sportingly let us into her chook shed to dig out some chook poo for our garden. We carried the chook poo in two big buckets back to our yard and put it in the compost to mature. The lady said to leave it for four weeks before adding to the garden beds. This was only one week ago.

CEYLON SPINACH

I have come to realise gardening is as much a waiting game as it is sometimes physically tasking, a lot of research, planning and trial-and-error. I must admit, in the last few days I have felt somehow deflated at times. My mental conversation goes along the lines of: "The plants are in. Now what?" I am not a patient gardener... nor am I in fact, a patient person at all.

In order to boost my spirits, and trick myself into delving further into this garden adventure upon which I have embarked, I take stock of how far the garden has come since June. I observe the tiny things which have grown, or are about to.

A couple of days ago, a tiny arrowhead peeked out from the top of one of the sweetcorn. I was pleasantly surprised as I was proud. So far so good. Although ginger and black ants love nestling amongst corn leaves, right near where new ears of corn will sprout. I hope this doesn't mean the ants will destroy all cobs before they mature. The ants are still overrunning the garden. The nursery lady from round the back - let's call her Mrs Mulch - says ants are a nuisance and should be gotten rid of. However an author I am reading lately, Babs Corbette, seems to think ants are good as they help aerate soil and dispose of dead matter, in her book "Intimate Secrets of a Flamboyant Gardener".

What I need are worms, which would do the job a hundredfold of ants, if indeed, that is what ants actually do. So far, all the ant activity I have seen is either intrusive or unintelligible. Worms would not disturb or eat living plants, as they are only interested in consuming anything which was once alive. Hmm.. worm farming. Now THAT'S an intriguing thought.