Hey guys, it's Brijette with San Diego Seed Company and today I want to talk to you about
choosing your corn varieties for this upcoming season. Now, before I get into all the details
about different corn varieties, make sure you hit the subscribe button and the notification
button so that you can get notified anytime we've got great content that you might want to see.
So all right, it's February and a lot of you are either buying your corn seed or thinking
about what kind of corn you want to grow this year and I want to give you some tips and tricks and
professional advice that can help make your corn season the best possible. So, first thing is what
kind of corn do you want to grow? Well, there's quite a few different varieties and types of
corn and I'm going to break them down for you. So, you have sweet corn, this is a really good
variety of sweet corn here, and that's meant for fresh eating. Sweet corn is what you think of when
you go to the market and you buy corn that's in the produce aisle, that you peel and you boil or
put on the grill and eat fresh, that's what sweet corn is. It's delicious, milky, sugary, yumminess.
This is just one of the hundreds and hundreds, and hundreds of varieties of sweet corn that
are available out there. Now, I want to show you a really cool trick here. So, if you're looking
at seed and you want to know, 'hmm, I wonder if this is a sweet corn or a different type of corn?'
Sweet corn is always going to be all wrinkly like that, and you want to know why? It's because it's
full of a lot of sugar, and as that sugar breaks down and dehydrates you actually get this really
wrinkly old looking corn here, but that's a key trick in knowing whether or not it's a sweet corn
or a different type. So, that's sweet corn. That's probably the most popular. If you're
a brand new grower and you really just want to eat corn straight from the garden or make corn
salsa or things like that, stick with the sweet corn variety. There's a lot of different types of
sweet corn, there's sugar enhanced, there's super sweet, there's heirloom corn varieties; and all of
the varieties that are called sweet corn are going to be made for fresh eating right off the cob.
You know, harvesting them, taking them in the kitchen, eating them that day.
Another very popular variety but that's very different is popcorn, okay. Now, if you tried
to grow this and eat this straight off the cob you might break a tooth. I wouldn't recommend it.
But, what is so much fun about popcorn is, it is exactly what farmers grow to put in the popcorn
bags that you buy, and pop, and eat popcorn. This is a super popular variety because it's
absolutely stunning on the cob, it's great colors, and I'll show you something really cool with this.
You always know that it's popcorn because the seed is differently shaped. I'll show you here,
very differently shaped than sweet corn. It's small, it's super hard, it looks like
kernels of corn. Now, you could take this and throw it in the microwave and it would pop.
Of course, then you wouldn't have any seed for planting, so you might not want to do that.
But this is popcorn, it is the same popcorn that goes into the bags of popcorn that you buy from
the store. What happens is you grow it, you let it dry on the cob, and then what we love to do is
actually stick the whole cob in the microwave and pop it, and still to this day it's like,
I've done it a million times, but I'm like a little kid, I'm so excited about it! So,
that's popcorn. Those are two very popular types of corn, and now there's a third category that I
don't have a pack here to show you, but I want to talk about it, and it's called ornamental corn.
So, a lot of corn varieties that are grown because they're really beautiful colors, but you're not
necessarily going to eat it. They're harder corn and it's corn that you can make like cornmeal out
of, or you could potentially you know, use it to feed the chickens or things like that, but it's
not meant to be consumed fresh right away. And, those are varieties like strawberry corn, dakota
dent corn which is a really beautiful dark corn, there's painted mountain which is
the gorgeous multi-colored corn that you see on the stocks in like fall decorations. Those are
the types of different types of corn that you can grow and now I want to give you a really expert
tip that's really important and I wish I knew in the very beginning when I started growing.
These different types of corn can very easily cross pollinate. Meaning that if I grow popcorn
at the exact same time as I grow a sweet corn, they're going to cross and my sweet corn is going
to be a hybrid of sweet corn and popcorn. And what that's going to do is it's going to make
some beautiful corn cobs, but it's not going to make for the best eating. That's because the
really soft kernels on the sweet corn will cross with the popcorn and you will have these really
hard pieces in the middle of delicious sweet corn. All right, now there's two different ways that you
can avoid cross-pollination of two different types of corn. You can either space them out far enough,
which requires quite a bit of space. It's almost a mile is what you need. Most urban growers
probably don't have that space. The other thing you can do is just space them out by time,
so as long as your corn plants your two different varieties are both not tasseling at the same time,
meaning that they're putting their pollen out into into the air, then they won't be able to
cross-pollinate. And, the easiest way to do that is just separate your planting by a few weeks,
and that will guarantee that, let's say you plant this one first this one will open up
its tassels and spread its pollen and it will be done doing that three weeks later when this one
is ready to do it. So, that's two different ways you can avoid those cross pollinations.
Now, no matter what you decide to grow this year, whether it's a popcorn, an ornamental corn,
or sweet corn; just remember the most important thing about growing corn it has to be grown
in blocks. Meaning that you can't plant a single row of corn or you won't get good pollination.
The pollen on a corn plant is very tiny and it floats through the air, and if it cannot
float down onto the receptor on the other corn plant, you're not going to get any corn cobs.
So, that's why you'll see on the back of every pack of seeds, it'll say plant in a block. That is
to guarantee that as the pollen falls, it's going to fall into the block of corn and guarantee good
pollination and full corn cob set. Now, just imagine, if you plant it in a really long row
the pollen from way over here may not get to a plant over here, or it may just blow in the wrong
direction and then you won't get any corn cobs. Which is the whole reason why you plant the corn,
right? So, remember plant them in blocks, and I recommend at least 20 plants, and you could plant
them very close together, on our farm we plant them six inches apart, so super close together,
which guarantees good pollination because our farm is very windy, and every year we have amazing corn
harvest that we get to share with everybody. So, we're wishing you the best corn harvest year yet!