BHU Day Ten - Work Experience Week

[lacedwaist]

As part of our course requirements, we need to complete a certain number of work experience days. As a part-time student I need to do eight over the course of the year. We can do these with quite a number of farms, businesses and organisations, and our days can be completed either in the three weeks set aside for work experience or on any other

Comments

[giffydoll]

I just think its awesome that you have a worm tutor!

[lacedwaist]

Yeah. We have a pests and diseases tutor too. :-)

[realityadmin]

You should call them the Defence against the Dark Arts tutor.

Or not, it depends how Pottery you(or they) are feeling, but for some reason it was the first thing that popped into my mind.

[lacedwaist]

I like it! :-)

Question about corn

[eleyne_de_c]

I have a few (about 1/2 a dozen) corn plants in my tiny garden. I know that they are wind pollinated so are probably not going to do a good job of that with so few. So is it possible to hand pollinate sweet corn, and how would I go about doing that? Not at the flowering stage yet.

Facilitating hot sweetcorn sex...

[lacedwaist]

Heya! You're right that corn "naturally" likes to be in a fairly big block for good pollination.

I haven't tried this myself, but we were actually discussing this very thing the other day. Apparently what you do is get a soft paintbrush and brush over the male flower at the top (the "tassel") and then apply the brush to the female flowers, the "silks" at the end of the cobs, which appear soon after the cobs begin forming. Apparently each silk, when pollinated, forms a kernel of corn. You do this every day for 3-4 days. When the silks go brown they've been pollinated. I've also just heard of people just giving the plants a shake on dry, still days.

Let me know how it goes - I'll be trying it myself with my small home patch of corn. :-)