Back in August or so we put down some landscape fabric to create a small plant nursery area for our potted plants.

Now we’ve moved all those plants to a new area, in preparation for creating a real nursery.

That left a beautiful dead patch of ground we could plant. I wanted to restart our corn landrace project, so I used a shovel to dig three 5″ deep trenches in the weed-free area.

I also made two more rows via digging a little 10″ deep hole every three feet. This is the “corn in stations” approach.

The layout looks like this:

We’ll see which pattern does better, the stations or the rows.

After digging, we crumbled up some half-dry cow manure and put handfuls in the bottom of the trenches and in the pits, then covered that with a little soil and sprinkled the seeds down the trenches, then placed 4-6 seeds in each of the stations.

All got covered with soft soil about 1.5″ deep, then we soaked the entire area with the hose.

That area was all grass before and the landscape fabric did a great job of killing it. The ground is now full of humus. Instead of tilling the entire area and perhaps turning up a bunch of dormant weed seeds, we just did the trenches and pits instead.

Planting corn in stations was something learned to do in the West Indies, though there the stations also included pigeon peas.

The second part of this experiment is that we didn’t till. All we did was dig small holes and trenches and toss in a little manure. All the area between the rows and stations is untilled.

We would also like to mulch the area with hay once the corn comes up; however, we have an issue with some escaping chickens that must be dealt with first. They destroy mulch.

My three-year-old told me I should “Whack ’em on the heads and throw ’em to the pigs.”

Tempting. She is quite practical.