In the Mayan origin story, God tried making people out of mud and wood but these peoples sucked and he destroyed them. Then he made people out of corn and we were pretty cool and here we are.
As you can tell, corn was pretty important to the Mayans. Fast forward a few generations to me trying to figure out how to grow corn at my son’s school. I have a few problems:
- I’ve never planted any before
- Corn is planted in March in my zone but take 90 days to harvest, which means end of May/beginning of June
- Josh’s school year ends the first week of June
I’m not supposed plant before March because it’s too cold, but if I wait until March then we will be harvesting the last day of school which realistically would be pure insanity. Not to mention that I want to clear the corn and plant pumpkins and watermelon that last week so they will be ready to harvest the next school year.
Solution: start them 2 weeks earlier indoors and transplant them in the garden in March. This will give me a 2 week window to harvest and replant new crops.
This is the corn I’ll be starting indoors.
I made newspaper pots using a toilet paper roll mold. Corn is not supposed to do well when transplanted from plastic pots. They have a long tap root from which many smaller roots grow from. If the tap root is damaged during transplanting then the whole plant may die or be weak sauce. The idea here is to give the tap root room to grow and then plant the whole paper pot into the ground. The roots should grow through the paper.
I filled the paper pot with Bumper Crop soil builder. I’ve never tried a seed starter soil. It’s more expensive. Bumper Crop is pretty chunky stuff but I’ve had small tomato seeds germinate without a problem. It has tons of good stuff in it like Dolomite. I don’t know what Dolomite is but it sounds pretty bad ass.
I put in a corn seed in each pot and covered them with an inch of soil. This is what 45 of them looks like.
I covered them with saran wrap and placed them in a sunny spot. I’ll update the progress.
Mari's Dirty Fingers 
Weak sauce and bad ass, i love it! What sites do you use when studying up on gardening???
I actually start with YouTube videos whenever possible. I get more from a good video or blog with lots of pictures than I do from reading a lot of blah blah. I spend a lot of time looking stuff up and then decide what I’m going to try based on where I live and what stuff I have around the house. When you are really interested in something, you realize what a treasure the internet is. AND gardening/farming is truly a creative and experimental endeavor, so there is always something new and interesting to try or tweak.