You're listening to the Beginners Garden podcast. I'm Jill McShehehehe with Journey Withjil.net,

and my goal is to give beginning gardeners the tools At the time of this recording, I'm sitting here and just the most delightful spring rain is right outside. It worked out perfectly for me to be able to record this today

because yesterday I got a lot of gardening work done.

I planted my black-eyed peas, squash, and my beans.

So it was the perfect time for a spring rain

and a perfect time to record this podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about a vegetable that I was too nervous

to grow my first couple of seasons. I'm not really sure why I hesitated. After all, in the area

where I grew up, most backyard gardens contained a planting of corn. But in about my third

season, I decided it only made sense for me to give it a try.

Number one, I had the space for it.

And number two, we eat a lot of corn, so wouldn't it be an obvious choice?

From what I read, though, I was nervous to grow corn because I read that it could be a little

bit fussy to grow.

I knew it required a lot of nitrogen and water.

It needs a certain number to pollinate. It has susceptibility to certain pests. And the time where the ears are perfect for

harvesting is small and hard to determine. And I have to be honest with you, growing corn ended up

having a little bit of a learning curve for me. It took me three tries to finally get it

right. What I'm hoping to do in this podcast episode is to go through what I learned and hopefully

if you're new at growing corn too or if you've had some of the same challenges that I've had,

maybe you'll be able to skip my failures and be able to learn from them before you waste a season

on your corn and then you can get a good corn crop your first try. You see once I overcame some of these

...