growing pig food

A note on the corn that is and will be a substantial portion of the pigs' diet over the six weeks or so:

Corn is the second crop in our four-to-five year garden rotation; it generally follows potatoes, which, as our food crop of greatest importance, gets pride of place.

Corn is a hungry crop. So, to add fertility after the potatoes are dug, we'll usually plant some cover crop like oats and peas, or buckwheat if it's early enough, and then graze that cover with chickens. We'll continue to run chickens over the bed when winter comes, letting the birds scratch through whatever litter is there and scavenge the grass, Dutch white clover and chickweed that stay green down at soil level and perk up when the warm plastic-covered tractors are moved up on them.

The chickens will probably make as many as three or four passes over any given bed in the course of the winter, adding a good bit of fertility in the process; and in the spring, the bed intended for corn will get another couple of passes before, in late May, the weather gets warm enough for planting corn. Litter and weeds will take up and hold the nitrogen; all in all, a good dose of fertility. Ideally, the chickens keep the weeds from getting out of hand before we till and plant corn in late May.

We plant with the Earthway seeder, dropping seeds at maximum rate (no cups taped over), and walking down the furrow to firm up the soil and mark the rows. Marking the rows is important so we can see where they are, in case the weeds get the jump on the corn and we have to cultivate before the corn germinates. Firming up the rows may also make it more difficult for the local crows to pull up sprouted corn as they sometimes do.

Cultivation is done with the wheelhoe, either with the sweeps or the oscillating hoe attachment. After cultivating between the rows, we thin corn plants with a draw hoe down to a single plant per foot. Depending on the rain, we'll need to wheelhoe again when the weeds start to come back; maybe we'll have to do it twice. When the corn is six inches high we plant black beans right up alongside one side of each row, and then have to remember not to cultivate too close on that side, until the beans are up.

Once the corn is meeting over the rows (3 ft apart), we stop cultivating. Hopefully at that point the beans have enough of a start not to lose too much ground to the pigweed and ragweed that will try to fill in all the gaps.

Country Gentleman corn gets to be about ten feet tall around here, with one or two large, full ears of shoepeg. We start cutting corn for pig feed when the corn is in the dough stage -- or later, if there's plenty of other pig food available, and if the deer and raccoons aren't competing with us.

All in all, we might have three to six hours of work in a bed of corn before harvest. Cutting and hauling take more time, maybe three or four hours for two people. Probably we don't have more than ten or twelve man-hours in a tenth acre of corn, enough to feed five pigs for a month and a half.