Best way to plant corn is in ‘clumps’

CONVENTIONAL garden wisdom holds that sweet corn isn’t worth planting in a backyard garden. The reasons given are that it takes up too much space, pollination is poor from small backyard plantings, and corn from markets and farm stands is relatively inexpensive and of high quality. I take issue with this conventional wisdom on all counts.

My vegetable garden has three-foot-wide planting beds, and down a bed I can plant two rows of corn hills, which are clumps of plants that provide for good pollination. Hills are 18 inches apart in the row, with five seeds planted per hill. In this case, I am following the conventional wisdom of planting “one seed for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow”; once the plants are up and growing, I thin each hill to the three sturdiest plants.

With such spacing, each of my 10-foot-long beds will end up with 52 stalks of corn. Some varieties yield two ears per stalk, but assuming an average of only an ear and a half per stalk, I still reap a very respectable yield of 78 ears of corn from a mere 30 square feet of growing area.

And who says that that 30 square feet need to be dedicated only to corn for the whole season? I’ve preced- ed beds of corn with early, cool-season vegetables like lettuce, spinach or radishes, and followed it with later crops of bush beans or autumn lettuce, broccoli or cabbage.

Reaping such a harvest demands good growing conditions; otherwise ears develop into nothing more than nubbins. Light is important, a minimum of six hours of unobstructed sunlight a day. I maintain soil fertility by each year sprinkling a nitrogen-rich fertilizer on the ground, then topping it with a one-inch blanket of compost. My fertilizer of choice is soybean meal, an organic source of nitrogen that releases nutrients into the soil slowly throughout the growing season.

Here in the Northeast, rainfall is usually sufficient to quench a corn plant’s thirst, but not always. So I water my corn, my whole vegetable garden, in fact. A sprinkler would suffice, but even better is drip irrigation which uses less water, lessens disease by not wetting the foliage, and can be easily automated.

Timely plantings let me free up the beds for other vegetables to precede and follow the corn and spread out the harvest season so I have sweet corn from midsummer on. The first seeds go into the ground about a week before the average date of the last killing frost.

One way to get a jump on the corn planting season would be to presprout the seeds before planting. A half day soaking in water, then twice daily rinsing in a screentopped jar kept handily in the kitchen, awakens the seeds and has them ready to plant within about a week. Avoid using fungicide-treated seeds (usually dyed some bright color as a warning) because it would be imprudent to have fungicide solution sloshing around your kitchen. For that matter, I take care to provide good growing conditions generally for my corn so I can avoid use of such seed altogether.

I haven’t yet mentioned anything about the quality of backyard sweet corn. Yes, the new varieties that you can buy in markets are truly supersweet and do hold their sweetness long after harvest, but is sweetness really all you want from sweet corn? Not me. I grow Golden Bantam, a variety that was introduced in 1906 and whose rich, corny flavor still maintains a devoted following. Silver Queen is another old variety — although not rich and chewy