lisaann, kind of vaguely.

I like the 4X4 idea...many smaller more managable plots...Or I could put down newspaper & mulch between the rows of corn.

I have a friend that has a large pile of cow manure & bedding sitting on a concrete cattle lot that I've had my eye on all summer long. I'll have to see if I can talk him into letting me have it....he spreads it on his fields...don't know if he'll want to part w/it.

The only good way to get them out without poisoning them is to either pull them, or till them under. Then keep turning them over till they have rotted. Weeds normally sprout from seed. If you turn them under, wait till the seeds have sprouted, then turn them again. Continue to turn them every few days not allowing them to root and get started. They will die and rot into the soil. Continue doing it till frost or winter freeze. Then start your no till method if you wish. Tilling has worked for hundreds of years. Many generations have survived with till methods. IF you have a tight soil you have to till or it gets compacted and chokes out the roots. If you have a nice top layer of compost tilth and organic matter then I can see not tilling. But thats not totally natural either because no place on Earth naturally has 12 inches of organic matter. Even in forests that have stood and dropped leaves and such for many years have a sub layer of silt and compacted soil a few inches under the fallen leaves and leaf mold.
All I can say is "By the sweat of your brow" shall you get those weeds under control. They need to be worked back into the soil. Always turn your crop residue back into the soil. Let it decay and become nutrients for next years crop. After all, it is nutrients from last years crop or this years crop that made it. I know some people prefer the no till on small scale or raised beds. But larger crop areas especially starting out is a chore to do no till unless you have lots of workers to help out.

[quote Kimm1]I would rather sip a cold malted soda pop and watch the soil bacteria work.[/quote]

Ya, and while you are at it maybe you can get those bacteria to kill the weeds?

HEE HEE!

Getting those weed seeds up and germinated then plowing them under is how to get rid of them. Without chemicals. The tilling will also kill the grass roots.

That was the original question. How to get rid of the weeds!

Yes the bacteria need oxygen too. Yes organic matter is of no use until it is broken down to forms the plants can use as food. Speed up that action and fertilize your garden. Till in all those standing corn stalks and weeds while you are at it and add tremendous amounts of oragnic matter.

Then water it , and when it turns green with freshly sprouted weeds, till it again. Let the weeds be your green manure crop.

Next year, plant the corn in rows spaced so you can run the tiller between them. No use busting your buns hoeing weeds.

We planted the rows 2 feet apart because our tiller has a 16"(I think) wide base....Well corn is a wide plant and the roots spread out...next year maybe 3" feet apart rows.

And I'm selling it on Ebay too...was going for $10/doz! Good Grief!

Hi organic_one,

Maybe I missed it when I skimmed through this thread, but I'm surprised nobody has mentioned planting a cover crop before tilling it all under. I've read that winter rye is a fantastic cover. It grows thick and will choke out those weeds while adding nutrients to the soil when you till it under in the spring at least a couple of weeks before you plan to plant. (Sorry, Kimm, but if I had a corn patch that big, I'd definitely be tilling.)

I remember on my parents farm, there was about 10 acres of hayfield that lay fallow for a few years. Got totally overgrown with weeds. My folks leased the land to a farmer who used no herbicides to the best of my recollection, planted a cover crop, tilled that in, then planted alfalfa and was making hay by the end of his first season.

Good luck!

I do have some white dutch clover seed i plan to sow soon since it's predicted to be cooler from here on out.

How about mowing it all down, run the tiller through it a couple of times, then start putting all the leaves you can find on top of it this fall. Of course, maybe you don't have that many leaves. You could combine leaves and straw, or some of the Horse bedding you can get at the feed store and just make it a late fall project to get the are completely covered over.

I've been amazed at how well the straw kept down the weeds. I would also recommend getting some poultry to eat the plot out. They kill slugs too!

quote:

lisaann; How much ground are we really talking about here, or did I miss that answer? What are you working with and how much free help do you have there, or is this a one woman show?

quote:

organioc one; We're talking about 1/3 to 1/4 of an acre...big for me.

I think that maybe some here don't know how big a 1/3 acre plot is. 14,520 sq. feet.

We are talking about a plot that is 80 feet wide by 181 feet long for a third of an acre. Now imagine if you will, packing enough leaves, grass clippings or what ever to cover that area deep enough to keep down the weeds................

Just PLOW! 500,000 farmers can't be wrong.

BTW organic one,

I have in the past grown a 1/4 acre plot for a fund raising project for the kids. We planted the rows 3 feet apart. This gives the corn plenty of room so you get large ears. Too close together and you don't get very good ears or none at all. These plots typically generated $300. That was selling corn for $1.20 a dozen. Prices have went up considerably since than. That figures out to 3000 ears of corn off a quarter acre.

Yes we tilled, then planted and when the corn was 4 inches tall we ran the Troybilt horse through between the rows then followed with a hoe, hoeing between the plants. This was all that was necessary to control the weeds. The corn was then ahead of the weeds so that any late comers were not a big problem. Yes, it took a bit of time to hoe the plot, but with myself and two kids we could do it in three mornings of about 2 hours each.

In the fall we would till in the corn stalks and have a local dairy farmer haul a load of manure onto the plot.

OK, do as you will, but this works for me.

quote:

We planted the rows 3 feet apart.

IMHO, that's kind of wide...but it may be my mental picture of how it's being planted.

Pre-tractor days corn was planted 42" on center. Because that was the width of a horse's rear end so it gave them clearance to run the cultivator.

Corn likes to compete with itself. Which is why in those 42" inch days, they also typically used "hills" of 3-4 plants instead of rows.

Corn is wind pollinated. The wider spacing may be acceptable in larger plots, too that wouldn't work in a garden -- if the wind isn't blowing just right that day, too much chance of a small plot not getting pollinated right (each kernel of corn represents a successful pollinization)

My best corn, with plenty of nutrients available, was a bed 36" wide, with three rows of corn planted with about 6" between seeds in a row, and 15" between rows. Next year it'll be a little wider, to allow 4 rows. Each planting point I did 2 seeds. Yes, very high density...plenty of big ears. It was all over 6' high, which is darn good for sweet corn.

The "four row" width for the bed is based on how far in a can reach to pick he ears in the middle

============
Getting a little back to the original...you can cultivate by hand, by animal, by tractor, by chemical, or use mulch. Pick yer poison

While I know some of the definitions vary, in my area (New England) and how I learned growing up...

There is a difference between Tillage and Cultivation.

Tillage is preparing a seed bed.

Generally, this is two things:

Plowing to turn the soil over and bury organic matter. Plowing in some areas is also important for exposing the soil to the sun to warm up to plant early enough in the season for crops to grow to maturity (many commodity varities have longer growing seasons then home garden varieties). Other areas use special plowing techniques to capture water...a common one being Listering which is plowing to plant in the bottom of the furrow where water will collect.

Except for stuff like Listering, after plowing, you Harrow. Harrow smooths the seed bed. These are what the big disk sets being towed by a tractor are usually doing (called Disk Harrows).

Cultivation is helping the growing plants --

It is done after planting and *I* consider it distinct from tillage and vice-versa. Cultivation is for weed control (pull up young weeds), and for breaking up surface soils that crusted in heavy rains (not a problem in all regions...and especially not a problem with good soils ) A crusted soil can hold back plants so they either don't break the surface or are delayed enough the farmer would see a yield drop.

Any of the specific steps done by the farmers will vary area by area.

"No Till" is popular in some areas where a cover crop is killed by herbicides or by a stem crushing roller (for the organic guys -- see third pic down at http://www.newfarm.org/depts/notill/roller_gallery/index.shtml for something usable by home gardeners!) and seeds are "drilled" into the soil underneath the mulch. Sometimes no cover crop is needed -- if you're just harvesting the seed, the stems can be left in the field.

"Strip Till" is being used in other areas, where a 6" strip is plowed and exposed, but the rest is left mulched.

No Till / Strip Till isn't practical in my area because all the large farms are dairy farms that use the whole plant for animal feed so there is no debris left in the field. And substantial cover crops aren't that practical. A cover crop like Rye may be used to hold the soil over winter, then plowed under in the spring.

In very northern, wet areas like Minnesota plowing is done in the fall -- the fields are too wet to work early in the spring, and if they wait until the field is dry to plow it and wait for it to warm up to the temperature corn needs to germinate, their growing season is too short. Plowing in fall isn't best for conservation, but it lets the soil warm up earlier in the spring.

Till - Plant - Cultivate - Harvest in that order; Fertilize as appropriate.

quote:

My best corn, with plenty of nutrients available, was a bed 36" wide, with three rows of corn planted with about 6" between seeds in a row, and 15" between rows. Next year it'll be a little wider, to allow 4 rows. Each planting point I did 2 seeds. Yes, very high density...plenty of big ears. It was all over 6' high, which is darn good for sweet corn.

In a bed just 3 feet wide the planting you describe will do well just because of its small width. However if you were to plant 20 long rows at 15 inches apart and at that density of 2 plants per foot, you would get lots of big tall stalks in the middle and no ears except on the very outside edges of the plot. The reason being that the corn will suffer for sunlight and wind, (which brings the carbon dioxide for food). Now if you space the rows 3 feet apart and plant only one plant every foot of row you will get very large ears across the entire plot.

Yes corn is wind pollinated, that is why in a small garden you should always plant 3 rows of whatever length for good pollination.

A good planting for small space is the 3 foot square planting. Plant 4 rows of 4 spacing 12 inches in each row. You can put 2 seed in each spot, and you will have 16 spots. When the seed comes up, thin to one plant in each spot.

One thing interesting about corn is its ability to sense the fertility and space of its environment. If you plant densely, the corn will likely only send up one stalk and produce none or just one ear. If the corn senses it has plenty of space and nutrition, it will stool out, which means it will send up 2 or three stalks, and all will have ears on them. For this reason it is better to plant less seed and let the corn decide what is best.

My seeder is engineered to drop one or two seed, (depending on the size of the seed) every 9 inches. I plug every other hole in the disk so that it only drops seed every 18 inches. This has worked out great. Always get big ears across the entire patch.

James1 said,

quote:

Just PLOW! 500,000 farmers can't be wrong

Actually they can be and Faulkner wrote a book, "Plowman's Folly", that showed they were wrong. Some of those farmers are chisel plowing today, but when you plant hundreds of acres of a single crop you need an pretty flat surface, unencumbered by plant residue, for that seed drill to work. Those of us with smaller plots can do things properly.

Yep, corn can judge...

Part of the reason for the high density on my last planting was the there was a long rain delay (and re-planting of an inbetween planting)...

Got to see my first batch of corn "Tillering" which is when it sends up multiple shoots from a single plant. Doesn't really hurt the main plant, but it'll form malformed ears on the tillers.

That indicated overly high fertility to me...so I double seeded the next batch.

And I think we kind of agree -- I guess the point I was trying to make is it's a home garden patch, planting 3' on centers is awful wide -- a smaller, denser patch does better.

Planting a bigger field the dynamics change and a wider spacing can make sense.

If you get into the Connecticut River Valley and see the sweet corn farms there, they seem to plant a double row with two rows 15" or so apart...then a wider (30"? More?) space between it and the next double row. Kind of a compromise between the two styles; can still be cultivated by tractor, and the 30" in between double rows must make harvesting by hand easier.

Ok, I will pipe in again. I plant my corn with my tractor and one row planter. 52 inches between rear wheel centers. So that puts my rows about....well, 52 inches apart. I plant with a 6 hole plate which drops 2 to 4 seeds every 2 feet. After corn is up, I thin to one plant per hill. I have had bumper crops with each stalk making 2 good ears and usually one little nubbin as we call them. All the ears are well formed and pollinated and filled out fully.
I plant G 90 sweet corn. When the corn was about knee high, I would sidedress with amonia nitrate ( I wasnt organic when I was growing commercially) and lay it by, throw the dirt to it, bed it up, what ever you want to call it.
I had no complaints about my corn.
To stop those pesky worms, plant a few Seneca early hybrids with them, a couple rows. The insect that lay the eggs that makes the worms will lay in them first because they are earlier than the G 90 and by the time the G 90 is putting out shoots the worms are grown and gone.

ALso, you dont have to have a clean field to drill if you have a no till drill. They have rotating discs in front of the drills that spin and cut a narrow furrow for the seeds to fall into. They can be used to plant winter pasure on a hay meadow without tearing up the meadow. Come Spring, you will never know you planted Winter crop there. The coastal bermuda, or alecia or bahaia, whatever you have on your meadow, will come right back and start growing.