Sweetcorn can be grown in a marvellously wide range of climates, even far northern parts of the globe where the Summers are short but the days are long. Here in the Southern Subtropics we don’t have those very long summer days, but our climate is also good for growing sweetcorn; it can be started early in Spring and grown till late. This year I am testing the window. At the end of Spring I have already put in several sowings with the aim of having corn to pick right through the warm months.
Growing sweetcorn
For planning crops, I am learning to think of vegetables as either single harvest or continuous croppers. Sweetcorn is single harvest, you get your two cobs per plant and that’s it. What’s more, for pollination corn has to be planted in blocks, the bigger the better, which means you have say thirty stalks all ripening in a couple of weeks. On the other hand, the gourmets say you should eat corn the day it’s harvested, for maximum flavour. That adds up to a lot of corn all at once, but I think freshly picked corn actually stores quite well in the fridge, especially if you leave the husks on so it can’t dry out.
My compromise solution this year was to plant blocks of 30 or so seeds every few weeks. Last year’s trial crops were from a single packet of 90 seeds, which doesn’t go far with that scheme, so this year I bought the 400 g pack to give myself plenty of room for multiple plantings and trial plots.
With warm weather the germination is near 100 %, so I’ve been pushing single seeds into the prepared beds at around a 40 cm spacing. So far I’ve put in four beds. The later sowings do catch up with the earlier ones, so that my first two sowings began showing silks within a week of each other, although they were sown 3 weeks apart.
The first bed was sown in the first week of Spring
After the first sweetcorn; pests
The main problem here is pests eating the cobs. I imagine they are rats or mice, but once they have located the crop it’s a race as to whether they or we get it. What started early in the season as a few cobs being nibbled from the top has become wholesale clearance.
Going from what I’ve seen displayed at the local hardware store, I think the main way to control them here is to poison, but that’s not an option with our dogs around and very interested in rodents. As for biological control the owls don’t seem able to keep up with them.
I’m thinking that corn for eating is best bought locally at the road side (at 50c a cob fresh picked, I wonder if it’s worth planting corn at home at all). It’s such an easy crop to grow, though. I might use my seed for planting in the chicken yard where the plants provide cover as well as fodder.