This is my favorite time of the year (gardening season wise). I love corn. I love to grow it, I love to shuck it, and I love to eat it. This is my second year planting Kickoff XR, an early super sweet corn variety. One of the things I like about this variety both years I've grown it is how easy it is to grow. No disease, excellent ear fill and the corn is ready end of July/early August, which is honestly perfect timing.
This year I planted two beds with 3 rows each at the very end of the garden in the sunniest spot, which seemed to do well. The corn at either end didn't grow as well, but still produced good ears over all.
I also grew butternut squash in between the corn stalks and tried to grow some late pole beans. The squash closest to the fence took a long time to take off, and one of the plants died. The pole beans also were shaded out due to being planted late, so next year I will try to get those in earlier and move the squash to a better spot in the corn.
We also harvested all the sunflowers, which did MUCH better than last year, even though they were in a more shaded bed. The squirrels didn't get them this time, which is probably because they weren't placed next to the fence. These are oilseed sunflowers - so my hope is to be able to try the seed oil press once they've dried sufficiently.
I'm also extremely pleased with the Blush onions I grew this year. This was a new to me variety, and it did fantastic. Way better than the Patterson onions I typically get (which did ok this year, but none of them got very big). These blush onions got huge, grew well and taste fantastic.
Reflecting on why these did better than the Patterson onions - probably comes down to sun quantity. The Pattersons got planted in the shade of some bigger plants, but they also didn't get so big last year despite more sun.
Both of these are long-day varieties of storage onion meant for this latitude, so not sure why the Blush have done SO much better. I might try a different variety of yellow onion next year and see how that goes. I will definitely be planting the Blush again.
In other news: also canned 9 pints of crushed tomatoes, froze even more and froze a bunch of corn. The cucumber plant didn't do so great. Probably got too much shade from the corn and also I found lanternflies on it...so I will have to watch that next year.