Design and Grow Your Own Corn Maze

Corn mazes are part of the Halloween and fall celebrations across the U.S. Creating your own requires time, space, and imagination, but the result is a “mini maze” sure to impress visitors and enrapture kids.

Find Your Space

Depending upon the neighborhood rules and the size of your backyard, a “mini maze” meant for small children may be possible, if you limit it to a few twists and turns. If you live outside city limits or have an extensive yard, then planting a section in corn for a single summer probably won’t be a problem.

You want to break up your ground using a tiller or a tractor to turn the soil. Obviously, if you’re not an enthusiastic gardener, you probably won’t have these around, so simply mow the grass and weeds from the area you want to plant, then break up the ground using a shovel and a rake.

Design Your Maze

Create a design using graph paper to measure out the dimensions of your corn patch by feet (one square equals one foot). Keep in mind what size path you want to cut (a little over a foot for a child-only maze, up to two feet for adult visitors).
If your space is small, draw a simple maze design, marking its path the appropriate number of squares wide. For more complicated designs, study some maze books or online designs and let your imagination experiment with some extra sheets of graph paper.  Below are examples: B for beginning, E for end.

Simple Corn Maze Graph, 9′ by 10′                                   Large Area Corn Maze Graph                          

Plant Your Walls

Using your graph design as a map, plant your corn in the shape of the maze: this eliminates the “harvest” part where you would traditionally mow a path. Use lines and stakes to mark out the design and plant in thick rows to ensure your walls won’t be too transparent.

Replace with new seeds any young blades of corn that fail or are damaged; weed out any overcrowded rows to prevent your plants from dwarfing each other. Make sure the corn rows and sections don’t wander into your pathway–mulch or tarp the maze path to prevent weeds or stray plants from taking over.

Finish Your Creation

Once fall arrives and your maze is fully grown, walk through it a few times to trim away any leaves or broken stalks that have strayed into the pathway. Replace your old string lines with more effect boundaries, such as old-fashioned straw twine or colorful orange boundary ribbons.

Decorate your corn maze with a “theme”, especially if you have young guests (or the young at heart) visiting your home. Rustling or fluttering ghosts made from balloons and trash bags or cheesecloth look great dangling in the dead ends of your maze. Spooky cardboard cutouts, festive fall pumpkins, jack o’ lanterns, and other ideas also work great — just use your creativity to add the perfect touch.

A modest backyard corn maze or big rural patch creates a perfect scene for your Halloween party or family get-together in the fall. Your hard work will pay off when you see the finished result: a spooky (or special) corn patch modeled after your own unique design.