Corn Stalks Beginning to Produce Silks

Corn is usually one of the last things to mature and start producing ears of corn that can be cooked or eaten raw.  The very first sign that I look for is the tassels.  Once the tassels are growing that means very soon silks should begin to grow from the stalk which is the start of every corn ear.

Just a couple of days ago I saw the first sign of silks and it just happened overnight.  It doesn’t take that long before they start growing and once they get going the ears will come faster than one would think.  Once they are a good size I will then start to peel back the husks that cover them in order to know when they are ripe enough.

Now at the moment not all my corn stalks are producing silks.  As you might recall I tend to grow my corn in sections and for the moment the first and part of the second sections are producing silks.  The third section is still just producing tassels, but will soon start showing signs of silks.

Here you can see some of the pollen that I have collected from various tassels in order to help pollinate the corn.  Normally wind is usually the catalyst that helps in pollination, but I like to do it by hand in order to make certain that all the silks have been pollinated.

Once I collect enough pollen I then place a little bit on each silk on every stalk that is producing them.

Now that I have added pollen to all the silks all I can do now is just wait for them to grow into the ears that I will eventually harvest and eat.

A third harvest of beans took place today.  I was not sure how much I was going to pick today, but I had seen quite a bit of them that were ready while I was watering them today.  I got nine pounds today which is what I got from the second harvest.  Not too bad, but I was hoping to get more than the previous harvest.  I will just have to wait until the next one to get even more.

I also picked more Roma tomatoes that were ripe enough to use today.  With all the Roma tomatoes that I picked this year I used to make tomato sauce.  I only filled up two quart jars and one pint jar, but it was still good only using about 12 Roma tomatoes.  I picked six today and used the six that was picked previously.

You can see that they were good sized tomatoes and these were only picked this morning.  I picked the other six sometime last week.

I also had a good collection of cherry tomatoes too.  I didn’t pick them with the Roma tomatoes and instead picked them later in the day.  I got 36 more of them and can easily add that to the large collection that is getting bigger by the day.

Cucumbers are also continuing to grow on most of my plants and as long as I keep feeding them they should continue to produce delicious tasting vegetables.  Today I got six in total and they were different sizes.

The first two are a strange yellowish to orange color, but they are not soft and rotting.  They were just as hard as the others and when I picked them from the plant I could smell the cucumber sweetness.  As long as they taste like a cucumber I could care less what they look like.