Sweetcorn advise

[kernowyon]

I will plant my 180 corn (thinks I have a few too many) from the end of the month.

I love corn

lol, I thought I was over the top with 40 plants between four of us.

feel better now, and can tell the wife with a smug look on my face that 40 is a conservative number

[rob the roller]

If you have lost your early sown corn it is not too late to start again with seed, but you will have to move fast. Plant them in peat, paper or fibre pots and keep them moist and warm. By the time they are tall enough to plant out the ground should be warm enough. As it is your first time, I would avoid supersweet, which can be fussy, and go for one of the traditional or F1 varieties.

[seasprout]

Hi,

I'm also looking for some sweetcorn advice, as I'm a bit of a novice at growing, this is the first year my fiancee (wife in 4 months), has let me have a vegetable plot. I've decided to grow potatoes & tomatoes, as they seem fairly easy, along with sweetcorn, as I love it!

Back in Jan I brought some seed potatoes, and chilted them, then planted them out at the start of April. Then 3 weeks ago, I went to our local garden center, and brought some small tomato & sweetcorn plants, each about 6" tall. I left them in the green house for a week, to harden, then 2 weeks ago planted them out (we're in Swindon, and it was a fairly warm spell, with temperatures reaching a balmy 17°c), this was at about the same time the first of the potato plants was pushing up through the soil.

Since then, the potatoes have shot up, and are now nearly 1ft in height, the tomato plants have gown about 50% in size, but the sweetcorn hasn't grown at all. What am I doing wrong? After reading this thread (along with Sweet Corn how to plant with pictures and advice - page 2) I'm thinking that I possibly planted them out to early? Maybe I should have left them in the green house til mid May? Or put something down around them, to keep the soil warm? The position is in a raised bed, which gets direct light from morning til about lunchtime, when it becomes a little shady, the sweetcorn should be protected from the wind by the potatoes, which are planted about 1ft away to the side.

If I did plant them out to early, how can I now save them, and get them growing again?

Many thanks

Ben

Hello Ben, welcome to the vine and well done for growing the best vegetable in the world as far as i'm concerned.!!

Basically dont fret about your sweetcorn, they will settle in and get growing.

If you have a Max/Min Thermometer handy you could place it where your corn is growing, this will show you just how cold it gets at night. Daytime Temperatures are a bit deceiving because it's the cold nip at night that dictates how well your stuff will grow.

Now just to make you paranoid....did you plant your Corn in rows or blocks..? such as 9,12,etc..??

Also I'm based in Leicester(bit more North than you) and I only Sowed my Corn a week ago in modules in a warm greenhouse, this is so I can plant them out at the end of may.

[zazen999]

I bought some more sweetcorn whilst I was away and am sowing it today. I don't think it is too late yet.

[bjblackmore]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the warm welcome and advice!

I had originally planted just 4 in a row (I only have a small plot, and didn't realise a block was best), but after reading the posts here, (and also find out that the 3 rows of carrots that 'were' growing well has been decimated by 1 slug basically going up and down the rows eating the stem bases, over night - Grrr), I went out and got another 8 sweetcorn plants yesterday, which I planted in place of the carrots, alongside the existing 4 sweetcorn to make a block of 3x4.

Plot is layed out as below, the tomatoes aren't in the plot, they are in big pots by our shed.

Potato Sweetcorn
X...X .x.x.x
..X ....x.x.x
X...X .x.x.x
..X ....x.x.x

I'm not sure what type of sweetcorn the original 4 were, I got them from our local Wyevale garden center, and the tag justs says 'sweetcorn', but the 8 I got yesterday were from homebase, and are the supersweet variety - the only variety they had - which I didn't realise were so fussy. Will they pollinate each other? Or do the 2 variety needs to be exactly the same? The Wyevale ones look exactly the same as the Homebase/supersweet, but then I guess most sweetcorn looks the same at the early stages!?

Ben

[zazen999]

Controversial note coming up:

On my packet of sweetcorn from the States that I am sowing today, it says plant in blocks OR spirals.

Spirals it is for me then....just because

Perhaps that might be an idea for round pots?

[Scottishnewbie]

what on earth is a 'spiral' Andrea? Well, i know what a spiral is ofcourse, but no idea what it means in relation to growing veg!!!! I like the sound of it though and am always up for trying something new....laura

[perkin]

I hardened a couple of my sweetcorn plants off over a week or so and have now planted them out using cut-off plastic soft drinks bottles as cloches. Should be okay to remove those in a week once the plants are a bit more used to the outside temps. It's my second year growing sweetcorn, so I'm upping my plant numbers to approx 16 from last years 9. Looking forward to fresh cobs on a summer bbq!

[zazen999]

what on earth is a 'spiral' Andrea? Well, i know what a spiral is ofcourse, but no idea what it means in relation to growing veg!!!! I like the sound of it though and am always up for trying something new....laura

It's just a spiral....so plant them out in a spiral pattern rather than a block pattern [see Ben's post above with x's for planting positions].

[bjblackmore]

what on earth is a 'spiral' Andrea? Well, i know what a spiral is ofcourse, but no idea what it means in relation to growing veg!!!! I like the sound of it though and am always up for trying something new....laura

I imagine it would look something like this:

[Scottishnewbie]

thanks folks, i think i feel a spiral coming on.......!

[Herbie]

Hi,

I'm also looking for some sweetcorn advice, as I'm a bit of a novice at growing, this is the first year my fiancee (wife in 4 months), has let me have a vegetable plot. I've decided to grow potatoes & tomatoes, as they seem fairly easy, along with sweetcord, as I love it!

Back in Jan I brought some seed potatoes, and chilted them, then planted them out at the start of April. Then 3 weeks ago, I went to our local garden center, and brought some small tomato & sweetcorn plants, each about 6" tall. I left them in the green house for a week, to harden, then 2 weeks ago planted them out (we're in Swindon, and it was a fairly warm spell, with temperatures reaching a balmy 17°c), this was at about the same time the first of the potatoe plants was pushing up through the soil.

Since then, the potatoes have shot up, and are now nearly 1ft in hight, the tomato plants have gown about 50% in size, but the sweetcorn hasn't grown at all. What am I doing wrong? After reading this thread (along with Sweet Corn how to plant with pictures and advice - page 2) I'm thinking that I possibly planted them out to early? Maybe I should have left them in the green house til mid May? Or put something down around them, to keep the soil warm? The position is in a raised bed, which gets direct light from morning til about lunchtime, when it becomes a little shady, the sweetcorn should be protected from the wind by the potatoes, which are planted about 1ft away to the side.

If I did plant them out to early, how can I now save them, and get them growing again?

Many thanks

Ben

Hi Ben
Welcome to the vine. I'm also in Swindon. I planted my sweetcorn out about a week ago. I have been covering them up at night and leaving them uncovered during the day, they seem ok, but only time will tell. Hopefully they will be ok.

[nilling]

I'm a sweetcorn n00b. My Swift have still not germinated after 2 weeks and I have them in a heated propagator

I know that they are slow to germinate but should I start another batch off?

[deezyb]

i happened to leave my sweetcorn outside for a night by mistake, put into the glasshouse then out again and left them out...prob for nearly 2 weeks, planted out tonight..so hopefully they'll survive!

[deezyb]

hi nilling...some of my seed grew straight away and other didn't but did appear eventually (none of mine were in a heated propogator, not sure if that makes a difference)...maybe a week or so from now I'd be having a wee dig around to see if the seed was germinating??