corn planting the old way

hello, finished planting 10 acres of corn may 1. used a 41 H farmall and a 490 john deere planter. i planted it with check wire at 40 inch spacing. i used a open pollinated variety called henry moore. it was alot of fun doing it and not as hard as i thought it would be. the cross check was right on so it should be easy to cultivate. hope to plant some wapsie valley and rainbow flint varieties this coming week. will try to get some pictures. i can remember seeing fields of corn that were checked on trips to southern minn. and iowa when we were kids and thought they looked neat.
 
that henry moore corn is it sweet and where did you get it......i planted an open also...two......stovells evergreen and country
gentlemen.......good luck.....dewy
 
I didn't know you could use check wire with the J.D 490. I bet your a little stiff from getting on and off the tractor to reset the stakes.
I planted Reid's yellow dent years ago with the plan of saving the seed to use the following years. The idea behind that was to develop, through the process of selection, a verity of corn best suited for my soil and growing season. Didn't work out through. I lost patience when I picked the corn in the fall. Most of it was tipped over and I had to run the snoots on the ground to get it picked up. Picked up a few rocks and ran them through the picker too. I was warned this would happen. But it would have made an excellent silage crop. It was very tall and had nice large ears on it, and would have been standing when it was time to chop silage. Only I didn't have any cows to feed it to. I only had hogs at the time.
 
henry moore is a grain corn variety. it matures in about 100 days. i got the seed from the borries brothers in illinois. it is know for its heavy test weight and high protein.
 
(quoted from post at 15:55:17 05/03/15) henry moore is a grain corn variety. it matures in about 100 days. i got the seed from the borries brothers in illinois. it is know for its heavy test weight and high protein.

I wonder how well it will stand for you? Did they say anything about stalk strength?
 
Interesting comments about using the checkwire planter. I gave an International checkwire planter away a couple of years back. He's a farmer & I no longer can use it.
Has anyone tried the "Vigor Root 550" for stalk strength? It's a hybrid.
How about Goliath Silo, open pollinated & strictly for silo with 15-ft stalks and leaves starting at ground level.
 
I have sweet g 90 planted it is older hybrid but I like it never tried it in a corn picker but pull by hard clean and eat ,laws me hungry, lol.
 
(quoted from post at 12:18:21 05/03/15) Interesting comments about using the checkwire planter. I gave an International checkwire planter away a couple of years back. .

When Mom left the farm in the late '90s, maybe '98, she left a two row IH planter in the back corner of the shed extension of the barn. also a check wire set-up that had never been used. The planter was almost like new.
As for the Wapsie Valley variety mentioned, I think it was named after the Wapsipinicon River valley in Iowa. Runs through Independence and Central City south and west of where I was raised and on to the Mississippi.
 
i have planted the henry moore variety before with the check planter and it stood very well for
me.we have alot of wind in n.d.so that is important.also the borries brothers told me not to
plant it too thick.also i recently read a book by ernest m halbleib,a farmer from il.who had
tests done the open pollinated corn that he raised and found that it was more nutritious than the
hybrid corn.
 
Dad had one of the first 490's in the neighborhood, everybody else was still using 290's. He used check
row wire for several years then just hill dropped everything.

Neighbor got a 494 planter and I'm pretty sure you could check row with them too.

BTO I worked for planted his beans with a "690" planter in 30" rows. No, wasn't a JD planter, but they did
build the two 490's that supplied parts.
 
I remember my Grandfather many years ago telling me about how they planted corn before the check planter came out. He said they had a skid, built from two 2x8 pieces of lumber, about ten foot long, they they pulled behind a team of horses. They would pull across a field, leaving the smooth indentions in the soil. They would then pull the same sled across the field leaving smooth indentions in the field but 90 degrees to the first pattern. They would then hand plant kernals of corn in the "rough areas" or the soil between the smooth areas created by the lumber. He didn't say how far apart the two pieces of lumber for the skid were but it seems they never had many plants per acre. This allowed them room to walk between corn rows with a hoe to remove the weeds - it was several years before they got a cultivator.
 
My dad used to check corn. When you think about it it is no wonder they didn't get very high yields with one hill of corn every 42". He had a half mile of wire for the biggest field we
had and it was two spools of wire. He was never to careful on moving the stake, so the cross alignment was not the best. All I remember was cultivating the second and third time bouncing
over the previous cultivation furrows. We had an IH two row planter.

In the latest Red Power magazine in the past times section there is a guy picking checked corn. You can see how sparse the corn hills are.
 
My dad never checked corn either, but i am pretty sure there is suppose to be two kernels in every drop and then if it had plenty of moisture then each stalk could put on two ears, And 3 kernels was two many, that was a guaranteed failure, all you got was nubbins then! Thats how i remember it was said !!
 
My dad told me about that method of planting corn by hand. The way the subject came up was when he bought a farm we found a hand operated planter hanging in the old tool shed. He fixed it up for us kids and we planted pop corn with it. Eight rows about 200 or 300 feet long. It had a little can mounted on it , two handles that you pushed together to load the next kernels of corn at the same time spreading the pointed bottom end dropping the previously loaded kernels. Pull them apart and the kernels dropped down to the bottom. We sold a lot of pop corn on the cob that fall.
Dad checked corn until at least 1955 when I left home. He usually went for 3 to the hill. With a good hybrid you could get a 75 bu yield but 60 was considered a good crop. Seems to me the population adds up to about 10 or 12K. He drilled the corn for silage and always said you would never get a good yield for grain doing that. The rows were 40 inch and if a we weren't pressed for something to do , some of the smaller fields were cultivated 5 times. If you went four you had to be sure to go that fifth time or picking would be real rough. I often wonder what Dad would say about chisel plowing, minimum and no till. We never had a sprayer on the farm when I was home. Walked many miles in the bean fields though, but he was always with us. He was no kid either as he was 47 when I came along.
 


I remember my Dad telling me they never checked when he was a kid, but used two hand corn planters at a time. One in each hand, an a quarter bag of corn seed in a bag over their shoulder to fill the hoppers.
 
I grew up in hilly eastern Iowa and was entrusted to plant corn with a checkrow planter and a very docile team of horses, The area farmers took great pride in having straight cross rows and many snide remarks about some guys crosschecking. You needed to have a certain feel for the tension on the wire when setting the stakes. By the way the f 20 with the steerable mounted cultivator would do a very good job zigging through the crooked cross rows but took a toll on the arm muscles, three levers to pull each time you came to the end of the row! I'm 89 now and still rember how proud I was when my Dad complimented me on my straight rows.
 
I have been planting obsession for the last five years with a jd 246/247 it's super sweet and freezes great. Where can I get sweet corn that is not a hybrid. Might want to try something different next year, hybrid corn prices go up every year.
 
hello jeff, there is a seed company in new york called green haven that sells open pollinated sweet corn seed. their phone number is 607-566-9253. i also want to thank all of you for your interest and the great storys about corn planting,what a great country we all grew up in!
 

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