When to pick sweet corn
I had to look up this answer myself since this is the first year I have grown sweet corn (Growing Challenge), here is the advice I found online:
- When the tassels turn dark brown
- When the juice from kernels are milky white and soft
- From GardenDesk, corn is ready when the raccoons eat it.
From my personal experience, use tassel color to determine if you should even bother checking if it is ready. Use the kernel color to determine if should actually pick it, since when I previous tried just by tassel color it definitely needed another week of growth.
Does anyone else have any proven techniques to pick that perfect ear of corn?
Tags: cheap, vegetables
How to save sunflower seeds
16.3 years ago harvest, sunflowers
The trickiest part of harvesting sunflower seeds is timing. If you wait too long, the birds will let you know when you wake up to the head of the flower on the ground with seeds devoured. There are a couple of ways to get around this when the backs of your sunflowers begin to get yellow cover them with a paper bag or cheesecloth to inhibit the birds from stealing them. Given I probably would get a letter from my HOA if I did this in my backyard I opted to cut off the heads a few inches down and hang them upside down in my garage with a paper bag below to catch any loosening seeds. Every few days I run my hands across them if seeds start falling easily it is time to harvest. The best method I have found is using a painter’s roller screen used for 5 gallon buckets. I couple passes over this and the head is clean.
I am too lazy to roast and eat the seeds so I normally save a handful for next year’s planting and give the rest back to the birds over the fall/winter.
Tags: birds, cheap, garden seeds, outdoor plants, vegetables
Vermicomposting – How to harvest your worm poop (castings)
16.7 years ago harvest, vermicomposting, worms
Now your worms have been working hard eating, pooping, and reproducing so now it is time to harvest the fruits of their labor (worm castings) There are a few methods to harvest worm castings so I will briefly describe a few:
Dump and Sort Much like it sounds you simply dump out your worms and castings onto a plastic sheet. Sort through and catch as many worms as you can and set them aside.
Divide and Harvest Move you compost and worms to one side of your worm bin and fill the other half with new bedding. For the next couple weeks only bury food on the side with the fresh bedding. During these two weeks a majority of the worms will move over to the other side where you can harvest the castings minus the worms.
Moving on Up Create a second bin which you place on top of your existing one (Rubbermaid containers and 5 gallon bucket worm bins work great for this) and fill it with clean bedding and food and after a couple weeks the worms will migrate into to the new bin. Now you simply harvest the lower bin.
Using any of these methods I would suggest using a soil sieve like I showed how to create previously to better separate food/bedding from the castings and either use the remains in your next bin or put them right into your compost bin.
Tags: cheap, compost, vegetables, worms
