What corn are you growing in 2018?

Well, even though we are planting our sweet corn this week, later than we ever have, I was curious as to what varieties y’all have planted or will plant this season?

Last year we had a very good crop of Honey Select and Silver Queen, and a decent crop of Japanese Hulless and Strawberry popcorn. The HS was very tasty, good enough to eat off the stalk, and kept well. SQ tasted pretty good, but compared to HS, no comparison. The popcorn were a fun novelty, and we were able to shell quite a bit of kernels, but haven’t nearly used it up.

Of the sweet corn, I think we canned about 13 quarts. It doesn’t look as bright yellow after processing, but still tastes pretty good. We had some last week.

So, this year we are growing Honey Select again, and trying new variety (for us), called Ambrosia. Someone brought some to a church dinner last year, and it was delicious. So, I had to try it this year.

We’re not growing SQ or any popcorn this year. My wife wants to grow pole beans with them, that is, use the cornstalk as a bean trellis. I think it’s messy, but it would save me time stringing up a wire trellis.

I am a little envious of all the different varieties of corn that you have available. We have very few corn diseases so it is worth having so few varieties if it means the diseases stay out.

We are at the start of winter here so no corn planting for some time, last summer I grew “Immali corn”

Immali corn is a pink or purple and white sweet corn. It is one of the very few coloured sweet corns that is available in Australia. It tastes good and is productive, plus my kids love it, so I will grow it again.

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I’m growing Incredible, which I also did last year based off of @thecityman’s recommendation. And I’m also doin Glass Gem as a novelty.

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peaches and cream

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I do like incredible and am glad you apparently did as well. I’m sure I did recommend it, but if I did so in the last 2 years then it would have been recommended as my second choice. My very favorite sweet corn since the first time I grew and tasted it 3 years ago is HONEY SELECT. Don’t misunderstand me, you absolutely can’t go wrong with incredible and it is great corn, but I’ve come to feel very strongly that Honey Select is the best sweet corn I have ever grown. It is the sweetest and most tender of any, though very close to incredible in terms of taste. But it also just produces big, long ears that are almost always uniform in shape and size. So it is not only a wonderful tasting sweet corn, but it is also very beautiful and has long, perfectly shaped ears. I beg you to give it a try…you still have time to do a late planning this year, you know! :slight_smile: Good luck, Steven.

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Will do. Thanks for the tip!

For as long as I can remember, popcorn has always been my all-time favorite food, with watermelon running a close second. Therefore, in our raised-bed garden, it’s popcorn for our family, as opposed to sweet corn.

Two years ago, we planted Indian Smoke Signal popcorn, an heirloom variety with kernals of different colors. It tasted great, but some of it didn’t pop as well as I had hoped.

Last summer, we grew Dakota Black popcorn, which turned out delicious popcorn that all popped well. I ate the last of it in February.

This year, we are growing strawberry popcorn, which has smaller ears and shorter stalks–alleged to be kid-friendly, which is proving true with my kids.

I would like to plant multiple varieties, but I’ve read that cross-pollination is a problem with corn. hence our planting of only a single variety each year.

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I’m not a connoisseur of popcorn, but Strawberry seemed like a good popcorn for us when we grew it last year. Certainly had a unique look to it. Here is a pic of it and Japanese Hulless we picked last year.

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We grew two types of popcorn along with a SE sweet corn (Silver Queen), and a SY sweet corn (Honey Select), and we didn’t have any cross pollination issues. I read from many sources that HS doesn’t have such issues with other sweet corns. We are growing it again this year, but this time with Ambrosia and Kandy Korn, both SE. We’ll see if it that statement holds true.

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