02-11-2017, 02:18 PM
It was a ~20 inch wide cheap plastic container from Home Depot.
Corn pollinates itself with the help of the wind and gravity (the male flowers (the tassels) are at the top of the plant, the silk is the female flower). Corn needs to grow closely to other corn for pollination, apparently not a problem when you have ~9 plants in one small container so long as they are flowering together.
I water the container daily on the days there isn't significant rain. I fertilize weekly. I did a lot of research on others' experiments with container corn and speculated that most of the failures were due to not enough plant density (those who complained of not enough kernels) or failure to thrive (not enough fertilizer... come on, 9 corn plants in a tiny container for a plant well known to need turbo charged amounts of nitrogen). On my next experiment I plan to continue the weekly fertilizing but possibly double the amount.
In other news, our container potatoes also seem to be doing very well. We haven't harvested yet but did some careful "digging around" with fingers to assess the potato development. Will have more info in a few weeks.
Corn pollinates itself with the help of the wind and gravity (the male flowers (the tassels) are at the top of the plant, the silk is the female flower). Corn needs to grow closely to other corn for pollination, apparently not a problem when you have ~9 plants in one small container so long as they are flowering together.
I water the container daily on the days there isn't significant rain. I fertilize weekly. I did a lot of research on others' experiments with container corn and speculated that most of the failures were due to not enough plant density (those who complained of not enough kernels) or failure to thrive (not enough fertilizer... come on, 9 corn plants in a tiny container for a plant well known to need turbo charged amounts of nitrogen). On my next experiment I plan to continue the weekly fertilizing but possibly double the amount.
In other news, our container potatoes also seem to be doing very well. We haven't harvested yet but did some careful "digging around" with fingers to assess the potato development. Will have more info in a few weeks.