Good morning. I'm Nancy Grove. I'm a master gardener and I'm here in San Mateo County and this is my garden. Happy to have you here. Today we're going to be talking about how to protect corn from a very annoying pest and how to do it organically. Come on. Well here's my corn. This year I planted two varieties. This over here is bodacious. It's a yellow corn. And this one is silver duchess, which is a white corn. Now these are both pretty short season corn varieties about 75 days. And I planted them in mid June, which is a little late for me, but they're going to be ready. They're going to be ready mid August and the ears are already developing. I've planted these in raised beds and these are each four feet wide. That's important because corn needs a certain density in order for the pollination to occur. I have one variety in this bed and one variety in the next bed over. They're not very far separated and cross pollination can be a problem with corn. The normal sweet varieties, if there's cross pollination, not too much of a problem. If you start experimenting with popcorn or multi-colored corn or other unusual varieties, they recommend separation by as much as 50 feet. Most of us home gardeners don't have the opportunity to do that. So they are what they are. Let's talk a little bit about corn anatomy. Up here at the top is the tassel and these little bud like things that hang off of them are the anthers and they contain pollen. And so since that's up at the top of the plant, the pollen falls down and it falls on to the developing ear down here with these silks. It's really quite an amazing phenomenon corn sex is because the pollen has to land at the tip of one of the silks and over 12 to 24 hours it erodes a little tunnel all the way through the silk and into the developing ovary inside the corn cob. That's what it takes to make one kernel of corn. So next time you're chomping through corn on the cob, just think of all the work that went into there. That's the way it should work, but there's always a villain somewhere, right? Here's a picture of the dreaded corn earworm and the typical disgusting mess it makes at the tip of in a bad ear every ear of corn. I'll go to a fair amount of trouble to avoid my corn looking like this. The earworm is the larval stage of a moth that lays its eggs mostly at night and mostly later in the growing season on the silks right at the opening where the silks emerge. This is the time for action because once the larva is inside the ear has not much you can do about it. So what I do is inject half a CC of mineral oil with a little syringe into the top of each ear of corn as it's developing. These are both easily findable at any drugstore and here are some other tools I get out to before I do this. I usually pour out a bunch of mineral oil into a container so that if this gets dirty I can throw it away and not put it back in the bottle. Mineral oil is really oily and gets kind of messy so I always have some paper towels around. And probably most important I mark each corn stock when I've done it with a marker otherwise I'd get lost and keep doing it over and over again. Don't want to do that. Okay so now I'm going to inoculate this ear of corn right here. Here's my oil in my syringe. I actually guess I do more like one CC which is about a quarter of a teaspoon if you think in those terms. And what I'm going to do this doesn't have a needle on it it's just a plastic syringe. I'm going to carefully insert it right at the tips of where the leaves are that go around the developing ear. I've tried to find a nice little collar in here because then when I squirt the oil will stay inside. So now I'm going to try to move so you can see this I'm going to give it a squirt. Okay now I can see a little bit of oil coming out and I can kind of mush around in here a little bit to make sure it gets all spread around and that one's done. And this one I have already marked with an X so that I know not to come back to it. Okay so this is another one we can do. This one is quite early in the three to seven day window and I can just barely reach down in here to find the aperture and get the oil in. I think that's pretty good. So you need to do this during the season every four days so that you're keeping up with it. I usually have to do it about four times so it's a commitment but it's kind of fun and it's a lot nicer than cleaning the grunge out of the ears once you harvest them. I did want to point out that this is an example of what we call IPM or integrated pest management which is a philosophy and practice that the master gardeners have adopted. That basically says to get rid of pests you use the least invasive or toxic methods and materials that you can use. And so this would be an example of the mechanical method of control because we're suffocating the eggs we're not poisoning them. So that's how to get rid of corn ear worms in a non toxic way. Hope this was helpful and happy gardening. Thanks for watching.