Original post from Garden Desk
We have many raccoons that frequent our yard and garden. They eat the leftover cat food on the back deck just waiting until that magical night when the sweet corn is ready!
Then they party until every last kernel is gone!
So what can I do to repel those rascally raccoons? There are three ways for me and you to rid raccoons from our gardens:
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Original post from Subsistence Pattern
Every year we try new plants or techniques in the garden, sometimes with great success other times not so much. Part of the joy in growing ones own food is in the experimentation aspect of the whole venture. We rarely have absolute failures, only because we take food production very seriously and usually limit speculative undertakings to a small percentage of what we grow or create in the garden.
This year we are trying a variety of new crops and will also be experimenting with various water retention methods amongst other endeavors. I must say that I am really chomping at the bit to get going, more so then in previous years. Perhaps the long winter has finally taken it's toll upon my patience, but more likely it is all the newfangled food gardening ideas I have been formulating deep within the recesses of my mind over the preceding cold months.
All was OK until I noticed Blue Jade Corn in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue.
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Original post from Gardening Tips 'n' Ideas, August 18, 2007
Fortunately, another weekend has arrived. And with it comes more time in the garden and hours to wittle away enjoying my favourite hobby.
But as the sun sets on another productive Saturday my mind begins to caress the stay-in-with-a-video notion. The muscles are sore, but not nearly as sore if I hadn't warmed up with some stretching exercises first, and I feel a sense of achievement as I scan the yard.
A warm shower, fresh-pressed PJ's and a mug of hot Milo agrees with my earlier idea of a lazy evening. The one thing that's missing - hot buttered popcorn.
And I get to thinking, where does Popcorn come from? much like a child whose interest is peaked on hearing that Milk comes from cows. Surely, popcorn didn't start life in those microwaveable bags!
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Original post from Gardening In Central Florida, July 28, 2007
I'm going to give a shot at growing a small patch (15', two rows) of sweet corn this fall, sowing sometime at the beginning of September, hopefully harvesting some ears for Thanksgiving. After a lot of searching, I chose Silver Princess Hybrid, since it offers very early harvest, good disease resistance, and sturdy plants. I poked around the 'net for advice on growing corn in a sub-tropical climate (which ours is, kind of...) and came across this great picture of tropical corn in Peru from Breeding Field Crops.
Corn used to be grown extensively here in Central Florida, but that period ended with the Lake Apopka cleanup effort, which involved buying out hundreds of acres of field, many devoted to corn.
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Original post from May Dreams Gardens, June 28, 2007
Is it just me, or do the coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) seem to have a little deeper color this year? I wonder if it is due to the lack of rainfall?
Wait, I wasn't really out in the garden to take pictures of the coneflowers. I was heading back to take some more pictures of my sweet corn and the coneflowers caught my eye. Sometimes I think I have "GADS", garden attention distraction syndrome. I go outside with one gardening task in mind, see something else to do and say "Gads, I gotta get to that big tall weed" or something like that. Then I end up doing about five other tasks before I get to the task of the moment or even remember why I went out to the garden in the first place.
Anyway...
When I got up this morning, I decided that I needed to thin out the sweet corn to increase my chances of getting a few ears of corn from my "tiny by corn standards" patch of sweet corn.
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Original post from Our Little Acre, July 18, 2007
The lone tomato plant we've got - 'Mr. Stripey' - is finally large enough to need support. It's leaning, but not from the weight of tomatoes, because it's only got a couple of marble-sized ones right now. There are several blooms, but it's been really slow to get going.
The sweet corn, on the other hand, is ready early! Normally, we don't eat it fresh from our garden until the first week of August. But we did grow a different variety this year. 'Sugar Pearl' is a white corn that is an early, sugary enhanced hybrid and I picked ten ears of it tonight. 
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Original post from May Dreams Gardens, July 16, 2007
Did you ever think about how much waiting gardeners do?
I'm currently waiting for my sweet corn ears to fill out. I've spent less time obsessing over the corn this year, except for that one day when I determined it was planted to close together and I cut out nearly two-thirds of what I had planted.
I'm seeing several good sized ears starting to form so the extra breathing room seems to have helped the corn. Now I'm waiting for them to be ready to eat.
I'm waiting for the grapes to ripen.
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