As I’m planning my corn for 2023 I’m giving thought to spacing and to companion planting. My smallest corn likes to be tight (10"-1’ depending) and only grows a couple feet tall; last year my first foray into corns taller than my head suggested that they liked/ripened best at much bigger spacing, in a larger grid than 1’ x 2’ certainly.
With much bigger spacing I can see why a three sisters style companion planting might be really desireable. I planted squash around the edges of my corn patches and it didn’t bother to go in, staying instead on the south edge or crawling away from the east edge towards the sunrise.
I did some smaller blocks of corn and squash (maybe 10’ x 10’) and those seemed pretty happy, though again the north edge of the corn didn’t ripen as well.
I’m going to keep my gaspe in a grid this year, probably 10" x 1’. I’ll let my saskatchewan rainbow do 1 x 1’, which worked well for it last year (though it was a little thinned by crows).
I’m thinking of giving my biggest corns (Cascade Ruby Gold, Montana Morado) 5’ between rows, with the rows running east to west, to mimic that south edge that seemed to make everything so happy last year. Maybe 5’ between double rows? The feet will be very shady though, maybe too shady for squash, though it could take favas or peas? A hill or checkerboard pattern of 10’ x 10’ patches with a 2’ x’ 2’ grid for the corn might be good, and squash or tomatoes in the alternating grids?
It really surprises me how much of a difference the spacing makes on my corn’s ability to produce ripe seed, and though I know I can select it to fit my cultivation preferences, I love that my garden is big enough now that I can play around with cultivation to figure out what my preferences are.
What do you all do? Rows? Grids? Hills? Something more organic? If you companion plant, do you intersperse individuals with individuals of corn in a sort of checkerboard, or alternate groupings, or edge plant, or some other design? Do you thin? To single plants, or do you let a clump grow together, as in a hill? How many plants per clump?
What do you find works well with your corn, and what’s worked poorly? How big is your corn, compared to your spacing?
Do you have pictures? I know Julia has some beautiful milpa pictures but I haven’t managed to look at those closely enough to understand what exactly is going on, not well enough to diagram it at least.