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Post by steev on Dec 5, 2012 19:52:05 GMT -5
Atash, I don't know what scale of corn planting you're contemplating, but your mention of a polytunnel leads me to think it's not too large. Unless you really have nowhere to do it, pre-planting transplants can gain you up to a month of grow-time. I do mine in 4"X 6" pots in covered underbed cases over heating cable in the basement. When they sprout, it's past frost in Oakland, so they go outside until I can plant them out on the farm. I plant ~4 seeds per pot, so I'm planting out a clump.
"A balance of ready cash in as safe a place as you can"; this is why people find pots of buried gold pieces; the small coins were spent and gone. Nothing new, under the sun.
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Post by atash on Dec 6, 2012 0:18:27 GMT -5
Steev, you're right, it's a small scale project. I'm scaling back because we've been having one cold spring after another after another. It's just too cold and wet to get the big field plowed early enough to have enough time to get the corn fully dried down in time before the autumn rainy season hits again. This year I had a lot of rotting corn because there was so much water in the cobs everything I tried failed. Wish I had a food drier with adjustable temperature, but I don't, and even if I did, it would have been a bottleneck for getting everything dried down. It was a mess. And the farmer and his equipment are not reliable enough for us to count on.
Better to get a small harvest, than none at all after going to all the trouble. I'm just growing out rare seed, not trying to live on it (yet). The good news is that my back yard has light, sandy soil that warms up fast. Yeah, I know sandy soil is not rich enough for corn but I'll feed it and enrich it heavily before planting. I'll still need the polytunnel to warm up the soil as springs have been so cold in recent years. I need about 2700 GDDs (on a 50F base) and I have 2300, so I need the jump-start on things.
Thanks for the ideas.
Some of us who do mini-farms in our back yards should post pix. Some years mine looks very much like a farm in miniature, LOL. I want to squeeze in some new quinoas too. Last year quinoa was a total loss. I'll need a mini-tunnel for that too as it can take the cold but not the rain!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 6, 2012 2:28:53 GMT -5
Atash: I don't know what your overwintering weed population is like, but I plant all of my early garden into soil that was tilled the previous fall, and not worked again in the spring. I plant a couple of early corn patches that way... About 3 weeks before our average last frost is safe for all corns I've grown. What do I care if I have 3" of mud on my feet by the time I finish? Feet wash.
It seems to me, like you'd be better off trying to grow corn that requires only 1200 GDD:50F instead of a corn that requires more heat than your garden has to offer. Who am I to say that? When I plant so many crops that require more heat than my garden can provide....
Corn dries pretty good for me, in a shed/garage/barn as long as it's on something like a wire mesh, and the cobs aren't touching. A fan can really help. Mold, mice, and moths are the biggest dangers to my corn after harvest. The seeds are viable very early on (milk stage), so if the silks have dried down, I figure it's good to go even if the husks are still green.
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Post by MikeH on Dec 6, 2012 5:34:26 GMT -5
Good luck to all next year. Everywhere. These charts reflect the current situation as of yesterday. A perfect storm black swan of global crop failures in wheat and/or corn and/or soybeans and/or rice is a pretty grim picture, probably beyond imagining. |
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Post by davida on Dec 6, 2012 7:26:39 GMT -5
Good luck to all next year. Everywhere. These charts reflect the current situation as of yesterday. A perfect storm black swan of global crop failures in wheat and/or corn and/or soybeans and/or rice is a pretty grim picture, probably beyond imagining. MikeH, We are living and trying to garden and keep animals in these conditions. I have mentioned the extreme drought and exceptional drought in some posts but have not gotten any comments so assumed no one cared. After living it for 2 years and watching "The Dust Bowl" documentary where the drought lasted for most of a decade, I can definitelty picture the "grim picture". The exceptional drought, as shown on the map, matches the Dust Bowl map very closely. |
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Post by MikeH on Dec 6, 2012 8:02:35 GMT -5
Everywhere. These charts reflect the current situation as of yesterday. A perfect storm black swan of global crop failures in wheat and/or corn and/or soybeans and/or rice is a pretty grim picture, probably beyond imagining. MikeH, We are living and trying to garden and keep animals in these conditions. I have mentioned the extreme drought and exceptional drought in some posts but have not gotten any comments so assumed no one cared. After living it for 2 years and watching "The Dust Bowl" documentary where the drought lasted for most of a decade, I can definitelty picture the "grim picture". The exceptional drought, as shown on the map, matches the Dust Bowl map very closely. In my case, it's more a case of not understanding rather than not caring. |
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Post by atash on Dec 6, 2012 14:22:34 GMT -5
It's like "insurmountable", LOL. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but shortly I am going to put down black plastic to smother them out. By late winter which is when I will get started on this project, the soil will be easy to work as long as the weeds are smothered out, and I will put down clear plastic mulch and install the polytunnels to get the ground warmed up as early as possible. Frosts end early but it will still be too cold in open air for corn without the protection.
For production purposes, I agree wholeheartedly, though for that matter my back yard is a poor site for any corn-related purposes at all. I live in the city, at 47.5 degrees latitude, in a cool-maritime climate, where soils are usually quite poor for various reasons. Pretty much every major growing factor is working against corn! Though there actually are a very few local heritage varieties (that are really short, small-cobbed, and not sweet despite being grown as sweet corn...).
Someone has proposed sending me some short-season corn that I will grow out, but I will have some others that have genetics that I want, and not surprisingly those genes tend to come from the tropics. Someone else upstream has already crossed them to temperate-latitude corns so that they are capable of blooming during long days, but that's still at lower latitudes than mine so I must assume that they need more GDDs than I have. I do have a very long frost-free growing season for the latitude--around 260 days or so--but the GDDs come in low because average summertime temperature fairly cool so it adds up only slowly.
The usual rule of thumb here is to multiply days-to-maturity by 1.5 to compensate. What happens is that runs into the start of our rainy season which is a disaster for trying to get the corn to dry down.
I think I can pull this off on a small scale. I could pull it off on a larger scale with better infrastructure on the farm, which is to say that if my aunt had whiskers she'd be my uncle (old saying...). It's worth a shot as we really need some human-food-grade staple crop corns. Just listen to Mike H and the bad news about crop failures on a global scale. I think we can work around this, but it will take flexibility and local production of crops that are tougher than commercial crops that have been bred for productivity over resilience and wider tolerances.
I've decided that our best staple crop here is potatoes. That and maybe relatively northern-tolerant nut crops (like the native filberts) for protein, and a few other odds and ends that adapt to the climate. It's just too cold here for corn and sorghum and too wet for most hardy grains, for them to be safe bets. That's not 100% true; we can grow some cereals at the margins, but western Oregon would be a better bet being a little warmer and drier. I'm doing this not because it's a great place to grow corn, but because I'm willing to take the initiative. I'll pass it along to someone else where summers are warmer and the soil richer (maybe good old Darwinslair) as soon as I've gotten the combination of traits that I'm after.
Although the USA grows huge amounts of corn--the largest crop in the world I believe, very little of it is human-food-grade and even less is actually a staple (sweet corn is more of a vegetable than a grain). All this corn...and nothing to eat!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Dec 6, 2012 14:50:49 GMT -5
MikeH: What data were the charts graphing?
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Post by atash on Dec 6, 2012 20:12:55 GMT -5
Joseph, I'm not Mike, but I'll take a good guess: those are commodity prices.
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Post by MikeH on Dec 6, 2012 20:45:30 GMT -5
The charts are Chicago commodity futures. I believe that they are the cash price, or possibly the nearest month, using the monthly close.
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Post by steev on Dec 6, 2012 21:58:47 GMT -5
"Not trying to live on it yet"; yes, indeed so, exactly to the point! Being a city boy dealing with an ecosystem from which I am estranged a couple generations, I am so very in sympathy with that. Being 2 and 1/2 hours gasoline-powered drive from my farm, I am a tad concerned about "sustainability", aside from my ability to drive at all, being 68 and counting. What can I do? I don't know, not being done. Remains to be seen.
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Post by steev on Dec 6, 2012 22:03:05 GMT -5
Davida, you must not take lack of comments as lack of concern; more like "what can I say?"
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Post by davida on Dec 7, 2012 0:03:31 GMT -5
Davida, you must not take lack of comments as lack of concern; more like "what can I say?" Thanks, Steev. I have been surprised how entering the third year of drought messes with your mind. I was certain that we would get our fall rains. But nothing. The ground is as hard as a rock. The worst for me has been the high winds (many days have 20 to 30 mph winds) causing dirty air that causes breathing problems. But on a positive note, my garden porn addiction has been broken. I literally have not spent over 30 seconds with the new seed catalogs this year. |
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Post by circumspice on Dec 7, 2012 3:08:41 GMT -5
Davida, you must not take lack of comments as lack of concern; more like "what can I say?" Thanks, Steev. I have been surprised how entering the third year of drought messes with your mind. I was certain that we would get our fall rains. But nothing. The ground is as hard as a rock. The worst for me has been the high winds (many days have 20 to 30 mph winds) causing dirty air that causes breathing problems. But on a positive note, my garden porn addiction has been broken. I literally have not spent over 30 seconds with the new seed catalogs this year. Aw... That is sad!!! My most cherished fantasy is dreaming of what I'd grow in my garden if I were able to afford the seed & the water to irrigate those plants with... I feel your pain. It seems that my area no longer has Exceptional Drought status. We have gotten 'some' rain, enough to lower the status on our drought. (?) |
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Post by davida on Dec 7, 2012 13:06:53 GMT -5
Good luck to all next year. Everywhere. These charts reflect the current situation as of yesterday. A perfect storm black swan of global crop failures in wheat and/or corn and/or soybeans and/or rice is a pretty grim picture, probably beyond imagining. Today, I would like to challenge each of you to think about what MikeH calls "the perfect storm of global crop failures". If the time is not now, it will happen in the future. Carol Deppe stated "the past century has had unusually calm weather patterns compared to previous centuries. We should expect much more drastic weather patterns." (paraphased from memory). But the start of the perfect storm is brewing. I can see it because it is a part of my life. I garden in an area listed as extreme drought on MikeH's map but my exact location is more in the exceptional drought situation. I work in the area of exceptional drought, see the damage and visit with the farmers on a weekly basis. As a consulting Petroleum Engineer, I have followed and studied the futures prices of oil and grains for decades. Let's take a look at the chart (the chart prices are in dollars per 100 bushels of corn): 1) In 1995, corn started a "leg up" from 200 to 500. Slightly over double the start of the leg up. 2) The storm passed and prices dropped 200 to 300 for a decade to form a solid baseline. 3) At the end of 2005, the price doubled from 200 to 400. 4)The storm did not pass, the sellers could only drop the price to 330 and the price doubled to 700. 5) In 2008, the storm passed and prices dropped but the new baseline was established at 350 to 400, approximately double the old baseline of 200. 6) This present storm started during the last of 2010, the old high of 700 was taken out and corn topped at 750. Another double in price from the 350 baseline. 7) In the futures market, there is a seller for every buyer. The sellers are always trying to drop the price. But from the new highs at 750, the sellers could only drop the price to 600. The present storm continues with another year of drought in 2012 and new highs are established at 840. The sellers are trying to drop the price but at this time cannot drop the price below the previous new high of 750. I have been surprised from the chart that another "leg up" double has not happened from the 600 baseline for a 1200 price or even worse, a double from the 750 area for 1500 . This could be because: 1) The global situation is not as bad as the US 2) 600 to 800 is the new norm 3) Waiting to see if 2013 is another drought year 4) The influence of using corn for fuel where usage can be reduced 5) I know nothing about reading charts  Hopefully, this weather pattern will pass and rains will fall on the farmlands across the world. Then prices would stabilize or drop. But we really do need to learn to grow food under various conditions. |
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