EXPERIMENTS IN BREEDING SWEET CORN. 299 



State. It is that even on the best of sweet corn land, heavily 

 manured and fertilized, one can have a final average stand of 

 more than 3 to 3^ stalks to the hill only at a heavy sacrifice 

 in respect to yield of ear corn, when the hills are as close to- 

 gether as in this experiment. Of course it is impossible to 

 make any general recommendation as to what is the best stand 

 to have in any particular case. It depends on the character of 

 the soil, the closeness of the hills together, the amount of fer- 

 tilizer and manure used and still other factors. The important 

 consideration is that he deludes himself who supposes that by 

 planting 6 to 8 kernels to the hill, and thinning to 5 or 6 stalks 

 (as many do) he is getting something for nothing in the fodder. 

 He pays dearly for that fodder in the reduced yield and poor 

 quality of his ear corn. We have yet to see any place in Maine 

 where, under the usual conditions of planting and cultivation, 

 the best results with sweet corn are to be obtained with an aver- 

 age stand of 4 or more stalks to the hill. There can be do 

 doubt that many dollars are deliberately thrown away every 

 year by the farmers of Maine by planting their sweet corn too 

 thick. The farmer who wants fodder corn for his silo will do 

 vastly better to plant a good strain of ensilage corn, than to try 

 to get a good money return at the corn factory and fill his silo 

 at the same time and off the same land. No American dairy 

 farmer would think of using his cows both as milk producers 

 and draft animals at the same time, yet many of them are trying 

 to do what is essentially the very same kind of a thing with 

 their sweet corn. 



One of the chief objects of this experiment was to test the 

 efifect of the number of stalks per hill upon the earliness of the 

 corn. As stated above (cf. p. 293) it was thought possible that 

 the reason we obtained such marked improvement in earliness 

 in 1908 was because each plant was allowed more space than 

 is customary. The results of the present experiment make that 

 conclusion unlikely. Notes regarding the earliness and other 

 characters of these plots were taken every few weeks during 

 the entire growing season. At no time was there any marked 

 difference in the earliness of an}- of these plots. The plot with 

 7 kernels per hill and the one with 2 kernels per hill were ready 

 for harvesting at practically the same time. 



