I grew up close to neighboring farms, corn and beans were always growing. Fresh sweet corn was always available in roadside stands, along with tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and apples.
One summer a friend of my parents invited us up to his cabin for a vacation. On his property, he had planted a corn field. With instructions to his wife to get the pot of water boiling, we hiked out to his garden to harvest some sweet corn for dinner. Each corn stalk sported one or sometimes two ears of corn.
We plucked what we needed, and then we kids were given the ears of corn and told to run back to the cabin. With all of us shucking corn, we were able to get the corn into the boiling water within 10 minutes of picking it. It was so sweet, I remember it to this day, decades later. From the moment it’s picked, the sugars in corn begin turning to starch. When you grow your own corn and can cook and eat it fresh, it is the sweetest corn you’ll ever eat.
Corn is an interesting crop. It’s best to plant it in blocks to facilitate pollination. Each ear of corn sends out silk. Each strand of silk is attached to an undeveloped kernel of corn on the cob. If that strand of silk does not get pollinated, that kernel of corn will not develop.
The pollen forms on the tassels at the top of the stalk. It’s large and looks a little like wild rice.
When the wind blows, the pollen drops from the tassel onto the silk, which hold it long enough to pollinate the ear. If you grow a single row of corn, it’s going to be difficult to pollinate, even if you do it by hand. You can pull the loose kernels of pollen off of the tassels and sprinkle it onto the silks manually if you want to help it along.
You can plant corn in a staggered pattern that will yield 4 to 6 ears of corn a week for four weeks. Here’s how:
To grow a little corn field in a 4×4’ bed, you’ll want to plant one row at a time for a staggered crop.
Corn likes to be planted deeply, so get 16 disposable cups that are about 6” tall and cut the bottoms out of them. Divide your bed into 16 square feet.
Beginning with the northernmost row, dig a hole in the center of each square so that you can put one of the cups in it, with the top of the cup even with your soil line.
Now, take a pencil and poke a hole into the dirt in the bottom of each cup so that it’s about 4” deeper than the bottom of the cup. Place two corn seeds into the hole, push them down with the pencil, and fill in the little hole at the bottom of the cup.
Fill the cup with water and move on to the next square. When the corn sprouts and grows above the soil line and the top of the cup, remove the cup and fill the hole in with soil.
If both seeds have germinated, cut off one of the plants below the soil line. You now have one row of corn planted at a 10” depth, which will give added stability to the plant.
As soon as the seeds germinate and the seedlings are about 2” high, it’s time to plant the second row. Don’t wait too long, or you’ll have pollination problems later.
Continue with the next 2 rows, planting as soon as the seedlings from the previous row germinate. What you’ll end up with is a tidy little corn field, with each row producing 4 to 6 ears of corn, and they’ll mature at a staggered rate as you planted them.
Corn loves nitrogen rich soil, and beans are a wonderful companion to corn. Beans develop nitrogen nodules on their roots and are considered a “green” manure. As you plant your corn, you can plant 4 to 6 beans of the vining variety in a circle around each cup. The corn stalk will provide a support for the beans, and the beans will provide nitrogen for the corn. The corn stalk roots grow deeply; the bean roots are shallower so they won’t compete for space.
You will thank me for this if you do it.
Happy Gardening!