Growing Corn Early

Reader Contribution by Ilene White Freedman
Published on June 27, 2014

At House in the Woods Farm, we may have a tendency to do things a bit unconventionally. We grow vegetable crops into landscape cloth usually used for trees. We trellis our tomatoes with cattle panels. Our most popular planting tools are a kitchen knife and a cement spatula. We transplant everything, even beets and beans. We even transplant corn.

Some people find this comical, but I would say it’s just another one of our unconventional ideas that makes sense. People are accustomed to seeing farms with acres of monoculture corn, and sure, that would be ridiculous to transplant from seedling trays. But corn is just another row crop for us, in a diverse organic garden.

Why Try?

There are many reasons we like transplanting corn. Here are some of them:

You can start it earlier, in a hoophouse. We started ours April 12. The soil temperature needs to be sixty degrees for corn to germinate. You can get that and more on your heated tables in April, instead of waiting for outdoor soil temperatures to warm up.

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