Something very odd is going on. Please let me apologize in advance for not knowing all the terminology.

This year, I decided I was going to start my corn seed in little peat pellets then transfer the seedlings outside. The primary reason for my doing this is because I pretreated the soil with corn gluten to reduce weeds.

1 Mirai corn seed per peat pellet. One pellet per hole. One corn stalk per hole or so I thought. When the stalks were growing, I noticed what I thought were leaf clusters growing from the soil line. I thought they'd be side leafs when the stalks took off and grew in height.

Well the stalks are starting to form ears and silk and have tasseled. Low and behold yesterday I noticed some of the side shoots are starting to tassel on their own and some stalks are developing 2 ears. Somewhat rare with Mirai 131y. I've been fertilizing well this year with a very slow release nitrogen and an organic NPK balanced fertilizer. I'm willing to accept this as a logical reason for some stalks forming 2 ears, but the multiple main stalks thing has me stumped.

The only things I can hypothesize is the following. When the corn was still in trays, I saw how quickly roots develop and spread. When I was pulling apart the peat pellets, roots were very often intertwined with adjacent pellets. Some of those roots got broken is the separation. I can understand how the main corn plant would generate roots to replace the missing/broken roots, and that the roots that were broken off in an adjacent pellet might intertwine with that pellets root system, but would those root segments with no top growth then be enough to generate a new plant?

Based on everything I know, plants don't work that way.

Any ideas? I'll try to post some pics shortly.