Allotment sweetcorn

It was worth waiting for. Despite the fact that my parents have informed me that their potato harvest ranks in the hundredweight, and that their tomatoes were weeks earlier than ours, we are definitely the winners in the sweetcorn stakes, mainly because my parents didn’t grow any.

We love corn on the cob anyway, and Himself once spent a few weeks working as a sweetcorn stripper on the Isle of Wight (isn’t that a job titled to conjure with?) although the whole story is not a happy one – his father died, and he took four days off to deal with all those things that have to be dealt with, and when he went back to work he was told he’d been sacked in his absence because they didn’t let casual workers take time off for any reason. And this was one of those firms that supplies Tescos!

Anyway, our sweetcorn, home-grown and all that, knocked the supermarket varieties into a cocked, or any other shaped, hat. It was simply sublime. It was sweet, juicy, easy to eat and very palatable: some people find that sweetcorn isn’t easy to eat because of all the little fibres that get between your teeth but with Lark Early that doesn’t seem to be a problem, there were a few fibres but they were soft and easy to get rid of by brushing said teeth.

What we’ve learned is that sweetcorn is easy to grow, but not quite so easy to germinate. We had about half our seed corn actually sprout, so next year we will start it a little later and make sure it is warm enough. It doesn’t like overly wet conditions when germinating either, and I did find that when I emptied the non-sprouting pots, three corn had germinated but then rotted off, so we will take more care with air circulation and drainage on our sweetcorn pots, because it’s worth it.

Labels: allotment sweetcorn