Sweetcorn at risk from a plague of rodents?

Every year I give you a photo of a huge combine harvester looming out of the dust and rumbling past the edge of our garden. Well not this year, for the air was still and the combine was for some reason much quieter.
Before I knew it, the wheat field next to us looked like this.

 The very next day it looked like this.

Nowhere to hide

Last year this spelled curtains for my sweetcorn crop. We quickly harvested what was ripe, but the rest got devoured overnight by field mice and/or rats, which flee the openness of the freshly cut field dodging the watchful eyes of kestrels and buzzards, and head straight onto our farm.

A kestrel and a rook captured in the skies above the
newly harvested field. Rooks are uncommon on the farm.

Last year five traps in the polytunnel caught five field mice the morning after the straw was baled up. It's not nice and they are beautiful creatures, but I have to do something to protect my crops. So two days ago had me rushing about setting mouse traps and laying rat poison (if you hit them hard straight away, it saves much bigger problems later on and minimises the amount of poison getting into the ecosystem).
This is not pretty stuff, but it is part of the reality of rural life.

So this morning I rushed out to check the traps and to check my sweetcorn, for it has been slow this year and none of it is yet ready for harvest. Just one vole in the polytunnel, which may explain the nibbled carrot tops I found yesterday and so far no damage to the sweetcorn. We'll see what happens over the next couple of days. Fingers crossed.

Sweetcorn Salome

The sweetcorn this year has performed slightly oddly. The cobs have swelled and ripened well, but the plants themselves are rather stumpy. The result is that many of the cobs are low down on the plants, within reach of anything that decides to take a nibble.

In the past I have grown my sweetcorn in a 'three sisters' method. This involves growing three crops in one area, corn, squashes (including pumpkins and courgettes) and climbing beans. They are supposed to complement each other in terms of nutritional needs, light and shade. That may work perfectly well in the desert climate where the native American Indians used it, but here in the fens the beans don't seem to do so well in this system.
So this year I tried three different methods of growing my corn.

The first was to grow them in blocks - it is important not to grow sweetcorn in single rows as it is wind-pollinated.
The second was to grow them in stations, 4 sweetcorns, squash, 4 sweetcorns, squash...
The third was to grow a square of 9 corn plants under a wigwam of beans, surrounded by several courgette plants.

In the end, the first two methods did the best. For some reason, those in the third system never got mature enough. Looking back on it, I think they may have gone in a bit later than the others. The beans got nowhere.

So, the conclusion to my experiments is that it does not really matter which pattern you grow it in, as long as it is not in single rows! It does make sense, however, to grow squashes underneath, as the plants quickly creep along the ground between the corn plants and their leaves shade the ground nicely, keeping in the moisture and shading out the weeds.

One reason why my sweetcorn plants were a bit stumpy this year may be that I kept them in modules a little too long. I also used a different supplier, as my original seed supplier stopped stocking my favourite variety, Sweetcorn Lark. I doubt the change of supplier had much to do with anything.

So, when the field next door was harvested a few days ago, I was keen to gather in the corn cobs, for the invading rats are more than capable of climbing a corn plant to reach the succulent cobs, not that they'd need to climb very high this year.
Most of the cobs were nicely swollen and the tassels had turned brown, so in theory they should be ready. However, in this country sweetcorn needs a long growing season to get enough sunshine and I had squeezed this at both ends of the season. I sent Sue in to test one of the cobs and it was deliciously sweet and ripe.

192 sweetcorn cobs in a wheelbarrow

We then set about the task of harvesting 192 sweetcorn cobs. Some plants had two or even three cobs, but others we left unharvested in the hope that they would swell and ripen further.

Not many to go

I lugged the wheelbarrow full of cobs up to the house and set about stripping (the cobs). To be honest, some of them could have done with an extra couple of weeks on the plant as they had not fully ripened, but we had to balance that against the risk of them being nibbled. Also, if they are left on the plant too long they can go too starchy. Harvesting on a large scale becomes more tricky once the summer holidays are over too.
Some of the cobs had developed patchily. I guess this is down to not being well pollinated.
In the end we got nearly 150 cobs though. We put them whole into the freezer. No blanching. This has always worked well for us and should keep us supplied with delicious corn cobs throughout the year, until next August and the next harvest.

In fact, we've got enough for Sue to make some sweetcorn relish and the rejects, the unripe and patchy ones, well let's say that the chickens were very grateful indeed.

Stripping back 192 corn cobs, the mind wanders. So I leave you with a somewhat quirky version of the dance of the seven veils. Sweetcorn Salome!

 

It's harvest time already

Strange lights shine across the fields during the night and the distant rumble of engines and blades hums away into the early hours. Fields which the previous day swayed in the breeze suddenly have neat crew cuts with perfectly straight rows of straw creating giant geometric patterns.

Here on the veg patch harvest is well under way too. We've already had a bumper crop of tomatoes, a basket full every day for the last few weeks, as well as cucumbers dripping from the three plants in the polytunnel.

But now the outside crops are coming good too. I've picked my first runner beans and French beans. The first and second sowings of broad beans need picking as the beans inside those fleshy pods have now swelled enough to cause the pods to hang downwards.


Runner Bean Scarlet Emperor

French bean Cobra

Then, of course, there are the courgettes.
Yes, they're coming again in an inexorable march. The more you pick the more they come. I've even discovered my first accidental marrow already.

And finally the potatoes have done well this year, growing and swelling quickly. This is fortunate, for I've had to take the tops off all of them as blight has been both early and widespread this year. Sunshine and rain both in abundance does have its downside. I'm just hoping that most of the varieties have had enough time to swell and that the blight hasn't got down into too many of the tubers.





So in the middle of last week I roamed the veg patch gathering in some of the harvest. Here's a pictorial sequence, a bit like a children's book. In go the beans...in go the courgettes...in go the potatoes...until the basket was full.