How to grow sweet corn

Sweet corn is a warm-season grain grown for its immature, sugar-rich kernels rather than the dry, starchy kernels of field corn. It needs a full season of heat, going into the ground only after the soil has warmed, and grows tall enough to shade neighboring crops, so gardeners give it a block of its own rather than a single row along a bed edge. Modern varieties range from traditional sweetness up to genetically enhanced types with far more sugar and a longer window of tenderness before it converts back to starch after harvest.

The hardest part of growing sweet corn well is pollination, because the plant relies on wind carrying pollen from the tassels down onto the silks of nearby ears. University of Minnesota Extension is explicit that corn needs to go in as a block of at least four short rows, not a single long row, which lets much of the pollen blow away before it can land. A second-year gardener who plants corn like beans, in one tidy row along a fence, ends up with ears that fill in poorly, patches of missing kernels where pollen never reached the silk in time.