Virginia citizen. (Irvington, Va.) 1891-1921, 1909-02-26

strings of fifteen or twenty ears and
suspended from the ceiling to prevent
destruction by rats and mice. or it may be
laid out regular in rows on shelves or
racks. If did not have good place to
store the seed corn at the barn. would
take it to the house. Noplace is too good
for this purpose, for it means many
dollars added to the value of the crop
the following season if the corn is
thoroughly dried out.
HOW TO TELL IF 1T WILL GROW.
Before planting corn in the spring we
ought to know whether it is going to
grow or not. If you go into any ordi-
nary corn field, and mean by this the
best fields in your neighborhood, not
the poorest, and count the missing
stalks and hills, you will find that from
ten to fifteen per cent of the stand is
gone. That means that the farmer is
blowing, narrowing, cultivating and
fertilizing ten or fifteen per cent of his
field for nothing. Poor seed is largely
responsible for these vacant places.
1t is too late to correct the fault after
the corn has ''come up". You know
that corn planted in' never produces
grain to amount to anything. The
plants from the second planting do not
stand any more chance in their struggle
for food, air and sunlight than two
months-old pig has for existence in a
pen of pigs of twice that age. The
corn should be tested for termination.
This can be done in the winter or early
spring when other work is slack. Do
not leave it until the rush of work is on
in the spring, because then it is almost
sure to be neglected.
A convenient method of testing a
large number of ears is as follows:
Lay the ears out in regular order on
the floor or on rack where they won't
be disturbed for week or ten days.
This saves the trouble of marking each
ear, as it is easier to number the ears
in the row consecutively from one up,
starting at one end of the row. Then
take six kernels from each ear to be
tested.
The termination can be made in a
box six to eight inches deep and any
size, eighteen inches by twenty-four
inches is about right for hundred ears,
filled up to one inch from the top with
wet sawdust, sand, or anything that
will hold moisture. A piece of white
muslin laid off in checks, one and one
half inches square, is spread over the
top of the moist sawdust. These checks
should be numbered, or some system of
counting to correspond with the row
of ears. be employed. The six kernels
of corn from each ear are placed on
the check having the same number as
the ear.
The whole box is then covered with a
moist blanket or wet blotting paper and
set in warm place to germinate. If
conditions are favorable, the germina-
tion will be well started in FIVE days.
You will be surprised at what you can
tell from this test. The kernels from
some of the ears will sent out strong,
weak and sickly, showing lack of vital
ity. Still others do not germinate at
all. The ears that do not germinate
and the worst ones of those low in
vitality should be discarded from the
seed. Such ears are the ones that are
largely responsible for the vacant places
in corn fields. You can't, from the
looks of an ear, tell very much about
its ability to germinate.
The small, irregular kernels at the
tips and butts of ears do not germinate
as well nor make as strong plants as
those from the main part of the ear.
For this reason it is good practice to
shell and discard the grains for an inch
back of the tip and half-inch from
the butt before shelling the corn to
plant.
CORN BREEDNG-How 1T is DONE.
There is one other feature of our
corn work at Blacksburg that differs
from ordinary farm practice, and to
understand the need of it we must un-
derstand how the grain comes to grow
on the cob. You all know how readily
corn crosses. If you plant sweet corr
and field corn anywhere near togethe,
they mix very badly. This is because
the yellow pollen dust. which you car
find floating in the air, in any corr
field, from one sort has fallen on the
silks of the other and set up a growth
that produces the kernel. Each kerne
of corn on the cob is a separate indi
vidual from all the others, and eacl
kernel socket has its own thread of sill
which grows out of the end of tn,
husks and must be fertilized by
pollen grain before the grain is set
Some grains are set from pollen pro
duced by the same plant on which tn,
ear grows. These are self-fertilized
we say, or inbred. Generally speaking
however, every grain of corn is cross
bred. One parent is the plant Oh
which the ear grows, the other SOM
unknown plant in that vicinity. If tn,
barren stalks and poor plants in a fiel'
, are allowed to produce and shed thei
, pollen, it is easy to see that the ear
which we have selected for seed ma,
have only one desirable parent. So w,
go into our fields at tasseling time an,
/ detasssel all the inferior plants that W.
find. 1t is not difficult matter at all
A man can detassel the undesirable
plants on an acre in an hour. 1t shoul
be done when the tassels first appear
This detasseling process does not affec
, the yield of the crop at all the seaso
it is done. Experiments indicate tba
half the plants in field can be detas