Growing And Uses Of Corn Plant
During the first week of school, I had waited patiently to see the small monocotyledon, or first leaf, emerge from the soil. I had chosen to document the growth processes of corn.
When the first week had passed and my corn had still not sprouted, I paid a visit to the greenhouse and acquired my second corn plant. Unfortunately, I missed the initial sprouting, but a couple days after that, on September 9th, I was able to document it dividing into two leaves. I haven’t ever had a green thumb by any stretch of the imagination, so I decided to start out by watering my plant in the mornings to ensure the soil remained damp and it was placed in a western facing window as this would provide the most sun for it. Between September 9th and September 23rd, in the western facing window, the plant received an average of 5 hours per day of direct sunlight. Care was taken to make sure the plant was watered in the mornings to prevent possible burns from occurring. I took photos of my corn plant daily to keep track of the condition it had been in the previous day to ensure positive progress was being made in its development. Within the last two weeks, however, the weather has begun to change, and the nights have been getting colder. Due to the cold snap, my little plant lost its two newest leaves.
One morning (September 24th), I noticed the most recently acquired fifth leaf adopt a wrinkled and slightly yellow appearance. This was an immediate cause for concern and was monitored closely. I had guessed that the cold had been the reason for the discoloration and started removing the plant from the window and positioning it closer to sources of heat during the nights to ensure that further damage from the cold would not be done. The process of removing the plant from the window occurred on the nights of September 24th through September 26th. It appeared that moving the plant to the window in the mornings before the window area had thoroughly warmed up, however, caused damage to a second leaf.
The two leaves were removed on September 29th and October 1st after it became apparent that the plant wasn’t capable of healing the damage to them. After losing the two leaves, I decided to relocate my plant to an eastern facing bathroom window. I had hoped that the bathroom would be a more encouraging environment for the plant as it is warmer, has a higher level of humidity, and morning sun available through a frosted window, which I hoped would diffuse the light enough to prevent sunburn from occurring. After moving the plant, I would estimate that it gets an average of 6-7 hours of diffused sunlight per day and the temperature would be no lower than 65 degrees at night.
Present day corn has numerous uses: biofuels, animal feed, people feed, alcohol, bedding, and even environmentally friendly plastics. It hasn’t always been that way though. Before domestication, corn, or maize as it is referred to by some, had a distant relative (there is a debate of corn’s ancestry, so I can’t say for certain who is the original ancestor) that originated in Mexico. The oldest records of corn being used by people are over 10, 000 years old. Today’s corn can grow between four and six feet tall and prefers living in a climate where the nightly temperatures don’t drop much below 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
Corn is a fairly sturdy plant, with a tougher, almost woody, stalk, and can do well without constant care. Despite corn’s height and hardiness as a plant, unfortunately, it is an annual and only has a growing season of one year. Since corn is a monocot, the veins run down the leaves parallel to each other and give it very recognizable stripes. Being a monocot also means that when corn first sprouts, it will only have one leaf as opposed to dicot plants that have two. With that knowledge in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that corn is actually related to grass! The complete taxonomical classification of corn is: Planta, Angiosperms, Monocots, Commelinids, Poales, Poaceae. In layman’s terms, they are both vascular plants that have seeds and flowers. The use of corn has, in recent years, surpassed the production of both rice and wheat although a majority of these are for animal food and the biofuel ethanol.
