Subject: Re: interplanting beans and corn-HELP!

From: [email-masked] (Brendan A. Niemira)
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 09:06 est

In Article <[email-masked]> "[email-masked] (Tracy Aquilla)" says:
>     Has anyone else out there tried interplanting beans and corn before? If
> so, I'd like to hear about it, since this didn't work out too well for me.
> This year, I decided to plant pole beans in with my sweet corn crop. I
[snip]
> (eg. every-other corn plant) or pruned the bean runners more. Any advice
> from someone who has had better success with this system would be sincerely
> appreciated. Picking pole beans from these sprawling vines is not much fun,
> to say nothing of the poor sweet corn yield I got. Thanks for any help.
> 
> Tracy Aquilla, Ph.D.
If you were to wait for the corn to sprout and grow a bit, you could come in
and plant your beans next to the stalks with minimal disturbance to the corn
roots (just a finger hole in the dirt^h^h^h^h soil :).  The growing bean roots
would work out an amiable relationship with the corn roots, and your more fully
developed corn stalk would be better able to support the weight of the beans 
& vines.  I think that a problem you might have is that sweet corn is harvested
earlier than the field corn traditionally used in this intercropping scheme
(Edwards, Lal, Madden, Miller and House 1990 Sustainable_Agriculture_Systems).
Good luck.
...........

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Brendan A. Niemira           |   "You know your Shelley, Bertie."             
Dept. Botany and Plant Path  |   "Oh, am I?"
Michigan State University    |       P.G. Wodehouse
[email-masked]     |       *The Code of the Woosters*
        All opinions expressed are entirely my own.