Great Compost for a full Season of Sweet Corn

There are two good ways to have fresh corn week after week.

Plant early and mid-season varieties the same day. Early varieties will usually produce after 8 or 9 weeks; later ones need 10 to 11 weeks or more. The result is 5 or 6 weeks of steady eating.

Stagger planting dates. In my garden I do this with Butter ‘N Sugar corn, one of my yellow and white favorites. I sow a block of it, and every 10 or 14 days for about a month I plant another section. This way, I get many weeks of tasty corn.

Corn prefers a full day of sun, so plant it away from trees or buildings. Think about the height of your corn varieties. Will they shade any plants? In hot climates a little shade from your corn can help many crops. I put most of my corn rows on the north side of the garden. They don’t shade any smaller crops, and provide the added benefit of blocking the strong north and northwesternly winds we get.

If you’re planting popcorn, keep it at least 100 feet away from your other corn. Popcorn tends to “dominate” and if it crosses with your sweet corn, the sweet corn could taste anything but sweet.

For sturdy corn, plant your seeds in a furrow or trench, then hill the plants as they grow. I plant corn in a furrow about 4 inches deep, with the seeds about 10 inches apart. Firm them in and cover them with 1 inch of soil. As the plants grow, fill the furrow. This supports the plants and also gets rid of weeds.

Plant late varieties for best flavor. Some gardeners, tempted by the short growing times of the extra-early varieties, plant them all season long. They’ll be disappointed. They’ll get ears to harvest but they will definitely not be as tasty as late varieties which need 12 or 13 weeks to mature.

Plant sweet corn in blocks of at least four rows. This assures good pollination.

Keep a big patch of corn weed-free with just a wee bit of work

1. The first few weedings are always with the In-Row Weeder. I drag it over the plants as fast as I can walk down the rows. I use it three or four times in every row, starting when the plants are just poking through the soil.
2. I use my roto-tiller to cultivate between the rows and keep any weeds from getting a foothold. By controlling the speed of the machine, I can maneuver quite close to the plants.
3. Hilling corn is very important in fighting weeds the easy way. I use a hilling attachment on my tiller, but you can do the same job easily with a hoe.
4. I hill the corn first when the plants are about 6 to 8 inches high. The hilling wings spill dirt around the young stalks. This buries and kills many little weeds and also gives a lot of support to the plant as it grows.
5. I plant my rows of corn 30 inches apart so I can take the tiller down between the rows and hill both sides.
6. I hill a second time when the plants are a foot or more tall. I change the angle of my hilling wings to push soil even higher up on the stalks. The wings scrape away and bury any weeds that are left around the plants.
7. If you hill corn with a hoe, cultivate between the rows first. This will loosen up about 1 inch of soil so you can pull it up easily with your hoe and not have to chop.

Pinch instead of peek to be sure corn is ripe

Never open a husk to check if sweet corn is ready to harvest. That’s an engraved invitation to insects and birds to ruin your harvest. My method is “touchyfeely” but it works every time and never invites pests.

I locate the top of the ear, knowing that sometimes the ear will not fill out the husk completely. Then I press down on the top of the ear. If it is pointy, it’s not ready to pick. (Usually the husks are still quite tight to the ear.) But if the top of the ear is flattish and almost rounded, the ear is ripe. (The husks are also a bit looser at this time.)

Some people have heard this tip in my lectures and have gone home and pinched the sides of the ear near the tip. This is incorrect. You have to feel the top, or the peak, of each ear—like feeling the point of a pencil and not its sides.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-corn

Harvesting popcorn is easier than harvesting sweet corn. You don’t have to worry about catching popcorn at the peak of sweetness; leave it in the garden until the stalks and husks are brown and dry.

Popcorn requires an additional 4 to 6 weeks of drying in a warm, well-ventilated place. Pick the ears when the plants have dried, husk them, and place them in mesh bags or spread them out in an area with warm air circulating around them. We hang mesh bags full of popcorn ears in our carport where they cure for 4 weeks. Then I hang the bags from the ceiling of our root cellar. The corn can keep for years in the cool, dry, dark conditions there.

I strip kernels from a few ears right away and store them in a glass jar in the refrigerator. All popcorn pops better if it spends 24 hours in a refrigerator, and I like to have some ready to pop. When the jar is getting low on popcorn, I go back down in the root cellar and rub two ears head-to-toe against each other to get more kernels.

A little home-grown popcorn goes a long way. One year I got 11/2 cups of kernels from every six ears, which were about 5 inches long. Each 11/2 cups popped out to 20 cups of popcorn.

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