by Francis Jock

Created on: May 09, 2008   Last Updated: May 02, 2012

Growing your own sweetcorn is an exciting gardening experience. It begins with planting that first golden kernel into the warm earth just before the summer sun calls forth the bloom of fruit trees and flowers. For many backyard gardeners, growing sweetcorn is a celebration of life.  With a few tips, you can grow your own sweetcorn and enjoy the harvest by roasting, boiling, or even as corn meal mush.

Corn is an essential part of the world's diet and is grown around the world, although not every corn plant shares the robustness or flavor of home grown sweetcorn. If you are planning on planting a garden with a crown of corn stalks, you might enjoy these few tips, based upon personal organic gardening experience, for a successful crop of delicious sweetcorn.

Planting sweetcorn

Sweetcorn should be planted in fertile, medium loam soil when the soil temperature has warmed to around 68 degrees F. If the soil is too cold, or too damp, the seed will rot. An ideal location is on well drained, sunny hillside that hasn't been tilled for some time. Corn is a hardy plant that will survive in places where other garden variety plants won't, as long as the soil is rich and fertile.

The best time to plant is when the wild cherry and wild plums are in bloom, on or before the full moon in Spring. When planting, be careful to make a hole to 1 inch deep, not too shallow or the first rain will float the seeds to the surface and the birds will eat it. If planting in a row, holes should be at least 6 inches apart, which will be thinned to 12 inches apart when the sprouts appear.

How many rows you plant depends upon how much corn you wish to harvest over the summer. Organic farmers might tell you that a good start would be to plant four rows, approximately 30 - 36 inches apart. Typically, a single stalk of corn will produce at least two ears, so you can calculate how long and how many rows you need to plant within the amount of garden space available.

Corn pollen drops from the tassels to the leaves below, so corn grows best when the plants are grown in a triangle pattern. Ideally, the corn's leaves will be touching when fully grown. When planting in rows, you should consider putting on one row every week in the spring, May-June (April-May in warmer climates) in order to increase the number of weeks that corn is ripening in August. Sweetcorn can also be planted in hills or mounds, spaced around a foot apart with three seeds to a hill.

If you're planting white corn, remember that

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