Transitioning from potatoes to corn in our garden

Last Friday after work, I harvested most of our potato crop to make way for a second planting of corn. The three rows of potatoes that I planted earlier this year can be seen in the lead photo on the March 31 blog entry, and also the March 13 entry about the beneficial effects of seaweed mulch in our garden. The potatoes were planted on February 7, a bit risky, but we were fortunate this year not to have more than a very mild freeze from then until now. And, as of mid-April, the possibility of an unseasonably late freeze for southern Louisiana is behind us. We filled two five-gallon buckets worth of ‘Red Lasoda’ potatoes. When I planted the potatoes back in early February, we happened to have a few brown potatoes in our pantry that were sprouting, so they were no longer very good for eating. I threw them in the garden along with the potato starts that I had purchased from a local feed & seed store. This explains the contrasting colors seen in the photo above that Judy took at dusk immediately after I finished spraying them down on our lawn.

On Saturday, I tilled the garden where the potatoes were harvested, shaped the rows, and transplanted corn that I had started in a greenhouse two weeks earlier. This represents the second wave of corn in our garden. The photo on the left shows the corn and edible soybeans I planted in early March. I suspect the corn and soybeans in the Midwest won’t look this far along for some time. The first planting of sweet corn was with a super sweet variety called ‘Early and Often’ which is advertised as being ready to eat 64 days after planting, or about three weeks from now. Right now, the tassels are visible inside the whorl of inner leaves, so the plants are on track to meet this target. The second planting is of a new variety of corn bred at the University of Hawaii. This variety is called ‘Sweet Sarah.’ It has a much longer planting-to-harvest interval, so I am expecting almost a two-month separation between the two corn harvest periods.

As a side note, corn and potatoes are almost universally included in crawfish boils down here. They are thrown in the mix, along with Creole seasoning, and really add to whole crawfish boil experience…reminding me that two weeks from yesterday, we will have our annual Thibodaux Ward Crawfish Boil. All are welcome to come and enjoy. You can check out last year’s by using the key words “Crawfish Boil” at the top of this blog.