side dressing corn

What do you sidedress the corn with and when?
-Juli

Depends, in my sandy soil I use 10-10-10 or 13-13-13 when I lay it by. (Last cultivation) real commercail growers use either liquid urea or ammonium nitrate. Corn loves nitrogen. In my younger days when it was readily available I used Chilean nitrate of soda.

I had thought I read somewhere that they used bonemeal when it first came up and then at harvest time but I can't find the thread.
-Juli

Bone meal is a good amendment for root crops, tubers and bulbing plants. Don't think it would do much for corn tho. They probably meant blood meal which is high in nitrogen.

This message was edited May 7, 2005 12:15 PM

Ok thanks Farmerdill, I was gonna go buy a bag of bone meal today. I look for something else with higher nitrogen.
-Juli

If you are strictly organic, composted chicken manure, fish meal or fish emulsion would be possibilities.

My DH is balking on the fish emulsion due to the smell.
-Juli

I side dressed with comoposted dirt, manure, or alfalfa hay last year ( had three kinds ofcorn). Had plenty of good soil/compost blend between the rows, so made a watering trench, and used that to hill around the stalks. Ooops maybe I should clarify, you said sidedress, did you mean "hill"? If you didn't mean hill, ignore what I said :-)

Bloodmeal often comes from the floors of the slaughter houses, and so I don't use it. When I fertilize, I use 5-3-3 Plant Tone, by Espoma, approved for Organic Gardening.

But the corn that got the hay mounds around it didn't need any extra fertlizer :-) And I had the best corn. It was high quality alfalfa, no weeds! Everyone loved it!

Hope this helps...

Yes, thanks. I've been experimenting with the blood meal for rabbit repellant purposes. We heavily composted the whole are before we tilled it also. MaVie had an interesting thread about a sort of alfalfa tea I think it was in the Brugmansia Forum.
-Juli

I side-dressed my corn with alfalfa meal, working it into the soil, which had already been amended with rotted horse manure. Here's hoping for a good crop!

Yepperdoodle! I have dreams of corn and tomatoes.
-Juli

And beans and squash!

bringing up the good and timely info...

Thanks! I had lost this one and my DH and I were just talking about what to use again.
-Juli