Time for a Corny Joke

Sweet Corn and tomatoes are two of my favorite veggies. I also love Ornamental corn. My dad loves telling children that he hand paints each kernel. In Manitoba sweet corn is ready in August and Ornamental corn is ready in September.

There are a few different types of corn:

• sweet

• dent

• flint

• popcorn

• flour

• pod

Dent corn is what is found in fields and is used for animal feed, is a base for high-fructose corn syrup, and other things.

Flint corn is often referred to as Indian Corn and is used for decoration in fall displays.  It is a very hard multi coloured corn. 

Popcorn is a hard corn that is similar to flint corn.  When the corn is dried it can be popped.

Sweet corn is the corn that people eat.  Did you know you can eat sweet corn raw?  Sweet corn can be yellow, bi coloured, or white.  The five main types of sweet corn are standard sugary (su), sugary enhanced (se), shrunken-2 (sh2), synergistic (syn), and augmented supersweets (shA). These types vary in sugar content (sweetness), texture, length of harvest period, storage life, and seed vigor/germination requirements.  A lot of these varieties need to be isolated from each so it's quite handy that my garden is split in two. I tried growing a super sweet last year and it was a failure. I'm trying again this year and so far it's looking good. The way I chose which corn to grow is by which varieties worked well for other commercial growers and days. I give a variety a couple of years to "work" and if it isn't meeting my expectations, it gets the boot and I try another variety. I'm growing 2 new varieties this year, giving my super sweet a second chance and growing a variety that I've grown for 15 or so years.

Ready for some real corny jokes:

Q: What do you get when a truck runs over a corn cob? A: Creamed corn.

Q: What has many ears but cannot hear? A: A field of corn.

Q: Why shouldn’t you tell secrets on a farm? A: Because the potatoes have eyes, the corn has ears, and the beans stalk.