Your plant nemesis

[bridgetmkennitt]

We all have at least one. It's that plant that you try to grow and grow, but for some reason or another, it just dies or doesn't bloom or doesn't grow any vegetables.

What plant do you consider your nemesis?

Comments

[sleepyfairy]

Gotta be corn. You'd think that with how common corn is in Ontario and how well it supposedly grows, corn would flourish here but I plant some year after year and get maybe one or two dinky little cobs. I don't really know what I'm doing wrong.

My mom, on the other hand, somehow managed to kill bamboo.

[bridgetmkennitt]

Nomnom corn. Maybe it has to do with the soil at your place? Totally not your fault!

Heh. Sometimes bamboo gets tricky.

[sleepyfairy]

Maybe! We have a bunch of cedar trees near the back fence thanks to the neighbor planting a ton of them so they could be doing something to the soil. Since I moved the garden this year away from the fence maybe it'll grow better! Here's hoping!

[malnpudl]

Corn, for the home gardener is HARD. Very, very HARD. (This is my story and I'm sticking to it.)

[theora]

A thing with corn is pollination. It's wind pollinated, which works in a field full of corn but not so well if you have only a row of plants. I've seen recommendations to plant in a block rather than a row so that there's more chance of pollination. And apparently you can hand pollinate (google for that).

(...she says, never having grown corn because she knows the raccoons would get it before she'd ever have a chance)

[sleepyfairy]

That's a great tip! I'll try it out this year! :D I have a few extra beds I'm setting up so it'll be a good opportunity!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I can say that planting a block of several rows does work, even without hand pollinating. Sadly, chipmunks got at the ears before harvesting.

[3rdragon]

Even commercial farmers have their corn hand-pollinated sometimes. My mom had a job as a corn pollinator one summer. (For maybe a week. But as much as she talked about it, I imagined her spending multiple summers as a downtrodden corn pollinator.)

[tielan]

Corn like really really rich soil. (As in, really rich. You can't fertilise it too much.)

It needs to be planted in blocks because - as someone else noted - wind pollination. Also, this year, I had "asshole corn" where the pollen stamens opened up and got fluffy about 2 weeks before any of the corn silks even showed their heads. I ended up having to harvest the pollen and hand-pollinate them, so the harvest was a bit sketchy this year.