Sweetcorn

We didn’t plant any corn this year, and I’ve got to be honest, I have a real sense that this is some kind of grown-up specialist crop that relative allotment novices like us shouldn’t be growing – does that make any sense?

Anyway, I’ve been peering and peeking around the site, to see how other people are growing sweetcorn and it’s obvious that it’s not a crop that really loves the strong Sussex winds (locals call them breezes, I call them gales, but we can compromise on winds) that buffet the allotment site. But it’s also obvious that some people have got the sweetcorn growing gene, and produce oodles of the stuff, even using sucessional sowing to get early and late crops. I love sweetcorn and think the supermarket prices are just daft, I’m definitely going to have to give it a go next year. But that means we really, really, really have to get some fences up so that we can shelter this tall crop.

The couple of allotmenteers that were using the Three Sisters method don’t seem to have had much success, but I can’t work out why – it seems that their squashes probably got away faster than their corn and smothered the growth: that’s how it looks, anyway. I shall have to think long and hard about this … anybody care to share sweetcorn raising tips?

Labels: allotment-corn, allotment-sweetcorn, allotment-three-sisters