CORN! I once had visions of giant corn mazes in my backyard, and huge harvests of corn to feed all of my friends at a Thanksgiving feast where we dress like pilgrims, and 10-foot tall corn plants that would make my backyard look like a real true farm. These are the reasons I planted corn.
As soon as I put the little corn seeds into the soil in February, I knew what I'd have to be doing come summer: hand-pollinating my corn plants. According to all the literature I had read on growing corn -and believe me, in America where corn is the number one crop, there is quite a bit of "literature" on corn- I was running the risk of producing unfertilized corn ears. Corn is pollinated mostly by wind, so corn plants are grown close together in large groups to make sure every bit of wind-blown pollen is caught and used. Here at FarmTina, where I only had space for 10 corn plants, the chances of natural pollination were slim.
Just to give you some background, here is what a basic corn plant looks like:
It is a tall skinny stalk topped with a bunch of tassels that hold the pollen. The stalk has long leaves growing up the entire height, and poking out above a leaf you'll sometimes see an ear of corn. Before pollination, this ear is just an empty cob inside a husk with silk threads poking out of the end. When pollen blows off of the tassels and lands on the sticky silks, it slides down the silks into the husk and pollinates the cob to create kernels. Yummy, juicy sweet kernels.
So, onto the task of pollinating my corn.
