One of the VERY special treats from the allotment - cut some fresh sweetcorn, get it home and into a pan of boiling water for 5 minutes.   A dab of butter, a grind of black pepper.

The tighter your timing, the better the organisation, the more remarkable the flavour.   It's the only time I take a mobile phone to the allotment, to arrange for a pan ready boiling on the stove for our arrival!

How to

• Choose a bed in full sun, but sheltered from the wind - preferably one dug and manured the previous autumn.   Corn is more fussy about position than soil type.
• Choose your variety - the further north you are, the more early-maturing the variety you will need.   Britain is at the northern edge of an acceptable climate for viable sweetcorn - and Yorkshire is almost off the edge!   It's the only crop where I'll make one sowing indoors, and another outside - in the hopes that both work!
• Sowing
  • Fill some toilet roll tubes with compost, or (better?) make some newspaper pots; sow one seed in each, mid to late April or very early May.   Place "pots" in a flat seed tray so they support each other.
    
    In early June, I harden off the seedlings, and plant the complete tubes/newspaper pots (cut open the bottom) in the bed - the "pot" should rot away, and you will have avoided disturbing the roots of the seedlings.
  • And once I'm reasonably optimistic that the risk of late frost has passed, in mid-May, I sow direct in the bed.   A Yorkshire summer is just a bit too short for growing them outside - so I'm going to try sowing earlier, using pop-bottle cloches this year.
  • Neither has been reliable!
• Corn should be planted in blocks (not rows), to ensure pollination.   The books say plant them about 18 inches apart, but the people with the best crops on our site have their plants only 12 inches apart.
• Water in dry weather - especially important when the plants are flowering.   A liquid feed when the cobs start to swell is recommended.
• As you walk around the bed, tap the male flowers at the top of the stem, when they are fully developed in late June/early July, to encourage pollination of the female flowers lower down.
• The traditional way to test for readiness is to peel back the sheath carefully, after the tassels at the end have turned brown, and squeeze a couple of the grains; if you get a milky liquid, they're ripe, while a watery liquid means they're unripe and a doughy liquid means you've waited a bit too long.   A better way - 'feel' the tips of the cobs through the wrapper leaves fairly regularly.   When the cob is ripe the tip will be blunt against the palm of your hand, showing that the kernels at the end of the cob, the last to ripen, have filled out; before that time the cob end will "feel" pointed.
• Twist and pull the ripe cob gently from the stalk - and cook quickly.   The nearer you can get to eating the cob 10 minutes after picking, the better they will taste!

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