It is rather lovely that sweetcorn is something that you can grow in your own garden and you will never taste a better sweetcorn than one that was picked just minutes before you cooked it. You see, sweetcorn is full of sugars when it is growing and once it is picked, those sugars progressively get converted to starch. As such, the sweetness dwindles and the flouriness increases. As you can imagine, those "fresh" corn on the cobs you buy in the shops are along way away from the ones you can grow yourself. If you like sweetcorn, then please try to grow some so that you can experience this.
Sweetcorn is a member of the grass family and you will soon see that the plant looks like oversized grass plants. They are also wind pollinated, so the flowers on them are not pretty and you need to plant them close together so that the pollen will easily transfer from the male flowers of one plant to the femail flowers of another. Poor pollination will result in cobs with gaps in.
There are two main types of sweetcorn that you can grow - the normal corn on the cob sized ones, and the mini ones that you can eat whole or add to a stirfry. There isn't any significiant difference in the size of the plants, despite the different in the size of the crop, but the mini ones can be planted individually or in single lines because they are picked before the kernels develop so pollination success is irrelevent.
When planting out the full sized cob corn, it is necessary to plant them close together and it helps to plant them in blocks of plants so that pollination is more likely to be successful. So, I would recommend growing a minimum of nine or twelve plants and planting them out in tight rows of 3 or 4 plants.
Sweetcorn originates from South America so likes sunny, warm weather. It is not particularly hardy to cold weather so you should start your plants off indoors at this time of year or wait a month to plant them direct into the ground. Germination can be a bit patchy so I would recommend sowing more than you want to make up for that. Generally you will get one full sized cob from each plant and maybe a smaller second one. Therefore, I would normally sow between 60 and 90 seeds. That may sound ridiculous but we all love homegrown corn so the four of us eat it every day for 10 to 14 glorious days in the summer and then the crop is over for another year. You can freeze corn but it is never quite as good as fresh.
They say that sweetcorn doesn't like to have its roots disturbed so if you aren't sowing directly into the soil, I recommend growing them in toilet roll tubes filled with compost. This way, when you come to plant out, you just plant the seedling and paper tube together. By that point the tube will be going mouldy anyway and it will continue to break down in the soil and the plant will grow through it.
Sweetcorn doesn't suffer greatly from pests. Sometimes a little maggoty thing will eat it from underneath and you will see this as a kind of twisted looking plant that will go on to die. Slugs and snails will munch through small seedlings if they are unprotected. Last year we lost a few plants to squirrels and we had to net them, but that was the first time in over twenty years of growing sweetcorn. Now they have a taste for them I imagine they will be a problem every year. Badgers are also known to devastate a sweetcorn crop overnight but we don't get badgers, deer or rabbits on our site, thankfully.
Once in the ground, sweetcorn plants quickly grow away, broading their leaves, shooting up in height and establishing robust roots. They will flower and then the cobs will start to form. If they are mini corn you will need to keep a close eye on them at this point and squeeze the cobs to check on development. You want to harvest them when they feel like they are a centimeter or so in thickness. Any more than that and they will get tough and develop a hard core, which is not edible.
With the larger corn on the cob you need to allow them to continue to develop until the silk tassles have turned a dark brown. At this point is it worth splitting the outer greenery slightly so that you can see inside and see if it yellow yet. This isn't easy to judge and you may end up picking some when they aren't quite ripe and others when they have started to go a bit tough and chewy, but hopefully most of them will be just right!
To harvest, give the cob a good yank downwards to break it off. Earwigs like to lurk in this area and will probably drop out as you do this. Then in the kitchen, trim off the top and bottom and put the whole thing, still wrapped up, in the microwave for 3-4 minutes to cook. At this point, although hot, the greenery and silks can be easily pulled way to reveal a beautifully cooked cob inside.
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