Female cucumber flower with the beginnings of a new cucumber forming behind it.

These plants were slow-starters, but now are growing in a few long vines. They need external support of some — I imagine they would do well on a trellis. The plant has both male and female flowers and must be pollinated in order to produce cucumbers. As such they are difficult to grow indoors (unless you are up for manually pollinating the flowers).

Once grown up, the variety of cucumbers I’m growing are getting quite big and fat — maybe 4 inches long and 1.5 inches in diameter. I plan on turning these into pickles later this summer.

My pathetic stalks of sweetcorn.

My neighborhood is bordered on one side by a lush, vibrant field of field corn (the sort that gets turned into ethanol and corn syrup, not the on-the-cob kind). Its probably 6 feet high, and most stalks are showing at least two ears of corn.

My corn, on the other hand, is looking fairly sad. While I never expected it to grow to be as big as the nearby genetically-engineered super-corn, they should have done a little better than this.

My tallest 3 stalks measure about 3 to 4 feet tall, while the remaining 3 which were planted closer to the house never got more than 1 or 2 feet off the ground. I currently only have 3 potential ears of corn — 2 on a couple of my larger stalks and 1 on a smaller stalk. Good thing I’m not a subsistence farmer, else I’d be very hungry this fall (or at least very sick of tomatoes which are growing like crazy).

I think I had two problems:

1. Early in the plant’s life I wasn’t as watchful of the water as I should have been. There were several hot week with no rain earlier in the Spring that I should have been giving extra water to the plants. I suspect this lack of water was during a critical part of the plant’s development.
2. The garden plot, while south-facing, only enjoys full sun until around 2pm in the afternoon. After this the sun is obstructed by the garage. Lack of sun as a potential cause seems to be confirmed by my best-looking stalks all being in portions of the garden that get light the longest as the Sun sets in the west. It’s also possible that the stalks closest to the garage wall did poorly due to radiant heat reflected off the garage wall. In either case, I’m going to relocate the corn to a different section of the garden next year.

Ear of corn developing? Maybe?

I also believe I can space the corn more closer together than I did. The folliage is not terribly dense, so I doubt they’ll obstruct each other’s sunlight much.

I’ll give sweetcorn one more try next year. It would be nice to be able to grow a dozen or so ears for fall grilling, but perhaps I’ll have to resort to the grocery store.

Garlic bulbs from my garden.

I have a new hobby this year. In the process of some recent landscaping work I had a small garden plot added to the backside of my garage. In it I have tomatoes, sweetcorn, cucumbers, jalapenos, and garlic.

And now last weekend I have the harvested the first crops of the season: garlic! 15 heads in totals, though one was damaged when I was pulling them up. I found that rather than “pulling them up” by their stalks, which could result in tearing out the center of the plant, it was easier to just dig them up with a garden trowel. I think the inability to pull them up directly from the ground is due in large part to my soil which was probably denser than it should be. Will have to fix this next year.

These were pretty easy to grow. Almost all of the cloves I planted last fall germinated and grew into full plants. If you are interested in trying to grow some of your own, the University of Minnesota has a great site on growing garlic in Minnesota. I assume the information there would apply to other areas as well.