Corn
Corny corny corn corn. I loove the corn. However, the damn things have never really grown right for me. Either earwigs (Blaakkhg!) or wind or weather or whatever it is, at best I’ve had a few misshapen, but tasty, offerings from my previous attempts. This year, of course, will be different. I’ve been a bit more ‘open’ about my seed choice, not going as far as using an F1 hybrid or anything like that, but one I reckon designed to be a bit more likely to grow big and grow well. Well, we’ll see anyway. I’ve two types of corn, and so a serious risk of cross pollination (which could be fun) one is a sweet corn and one is an ‘other’ I found randomly.
Sweet Corn – “Dolce (Golden Bantam)”
This is a.. “terrific heirloom sweet corn. It has good vigor and consistent production of 7in ears, and an excellent balance of sweetness and sweetness to rich ‘corn’ flavor. 80-85 days. 6ft“. Sounds great doesn’t it, looks good too, but then again they are trying to sell seeds so we’ll see. 6ft would be great, though I worry about the length of summers we have here to get this fully grown in time. 7in ears would be great too (all the better to hear you with, my dear!) I just don’t want to get my hopes up, but I’m going to try hard. A big long block of these will do nicely.
Red Popping Corn – “Strawberry”
Grow your own popcorn? I like it! And look at it! Like big corn strawberries. I’ve shied away from unusual corn in the past because most of it is just decorative. This too is a decorative corn, it can’t (or can it?) be eaten fresh (but I’ll try), however apparently it makes great popcorn when dried. Definitely worth a try. The seeds are fairly small, so I wonder how much popcorn you get out of them, I’m tempted to try popping one of the seeds I bought just to see. Depending on how this goes, and how difficult it is to dry and collect them, I think its definitely worth looking into other ‘popcorns’ in the future. What makes it a popcorn and not a sweetcorn? What makes a really good popcorn? All interesting stuff. These I’ll only grown a small block of, away a bit from the sweetcorn, but its not going to be far enough. God knows what is going to happen with cross pollination, it could be interesting that’s all I’m saying.
Both the corns are going to be grown in amongst squash and pumpkins, which is a subject of a different experiment.
