First taste of home-grown sweetcorn!

I decided to take the plunge and pick a cob today. This is the one I checked for ripeness the other day and you can now see how much the top of the cob is undeveloped. After I'd fully opened it up and squeezed one of the kernels closer to the base of the cob and the liquid that emerged was milky.

I boiled it for 3 minutes and it was lovely and sweet. However the kernels were quite small. They look quite plump but they are actually quite shallow so when you bite into it you don't get a satisfying amount of corn to munch on. But I'm still really pleased that I've managed to grow a new vegetable and it was edible! Most of my corn plants have double cobs, so we've still got a few more to enjoy!

you can read more about growing sweetcorn here

Sweetcorn update!

The weather has definitely been on the Autumnal side lately, but today was actually really warm and lovely. So I decided to check on my sweetcorn to see if it was ready for eating.

Well the silks have now turned brown, which is apparently a good indicator of ripeness, so I had a little peak underneath the husks to see if my corn was ready yet.

Unfortunately it was still looking a bit undeveloped and pale - not the glorious burst of yellow sunshine I was expecting as I unwrapped my little maize parcel. When I squeezed one of the kernels the liquid that came out wasn't milky, so I wrapped this cob back up to be consumed another day.

read more about growing sweetcorn here

 

I've been growing carrots in the space around the corn in my raised bed and I decided to pull up the last remaining ones to give the corn all the resources it might need to finish ripening.

I was quite surprised how many carrots were actually left in the bed and how big some of them had grown! These were Chantenay carrots and I bought them as seedlings from Chessington Garden Centre (along with spring onion and leek seedlings as they were on offer 3 for £10) because I haven't had much luck growing carrots from seed.

The first few carrots I pulled out a few weeks ago were a disappointing size and were only good for using in a stir fry as a "carrot gesture". But these ones I harvested today were of a decent golf ball size. I'm pretty sure it's because they had longer in the ground, but also they had more space to grow after I'd pulled the first ones out. When I planted the seedlings they were in little clusters of 3 or 4 and I didn't pull them apart to space them out as I thought I would damage them too much. I also didn't thin them out when they were growing as I didn't want to encourage carrot root fly. As it happened my carrots didn't suffer from that pesky pest and I think growing spring onions in the same raised bed helped as the oniony smell confuses them. The only problem I had with my carrots was ants and aphids, which is what happened to me last year. My carrots were covered in ants and these other tiny white bugs which I initially thought were ant eggs. A search on Google revealed the white bugs were actually aphids and according to wikipedia:

Some species of ants "farm" aphids, protecting them on the plants they eat, eating the honeydew that the aphids release from the terminations of their alimentary canals.

So I waged war on the ants and grabbed an out of date jar of cayenne pepper and generously sprinkled it all over the carrots - boy did those ants run! Anyway, my carrots seemed to be fine after that and I will enjoy eating the fruits of my labour later this evening.

Grow your own Sweetcorn 2011

Well it's certainly been a long time since I have posted anything on my blog! I haven't had a lot of time since I began working full time in London, so cooking and blogging about it has definitely taken a backseat. But I have still made time for some vegetable gardening so I thought it was about time I wrote about it! I also now have a smartphone, so taking photos and posting should be a bit easier and less time consuming!

This is the first time I've tried growing sweetcorn and it's going pretty well I think as it's blocking the view out of the kitchen window! I grew these plants from seed. They were an online freebie so I didn't get to choose the variety but they are called "Extra tender and sweet F1 hybrid" which sounds promising. They were easy to grow from seed: I just put them in 3inch pots filled with seed compost, watered, covered with cling film and left them in my mini greenhouse.

They sprouted really quickly and I put the seedlings into the raised bed when they were about 6inches tall. I read that you have to plant them in blocks so that they can pollinate properly, so I squeezed 8 plants into my 50cm x 1metre raised bed. I've got spring onions, carrots and dwarf beans growing in the spaces in between the sweetcorn and I don't think they've been competing too much for space or nutrients. I started off by feeding everything Miracle Gro, but then I read sweetcorn likes tomato feed so I switched to a weekly feed of that instead.

This is one of the cobs emerging a couple of weeks ago. I found it amazing how it suddenly appeared in the side of the trunk of the main plant. Each plant has 2 cobs growing so we will be eating quite a lot of sweetcorn quite soon!

Apparently they are ready to eat when the silks have turned dark brown and when you pierce a nice plump kernel a milky liquid is released.