Sweetcorn racing

One fact which I was interested to learn recently was that modern sweetcorn is entirely impractical and mostly nuclear in origin. Wacky American scientists in the 1940s put lots of different seeds and plants in the path of atomic radiation, as they believed that nuclear war was inevitable and the best thing to do was research which foods would survive the radioactive fallout and be available to the post-apocalyptic survivors. Most plants, unsurprisingly, didn't take very well to irradiation, but a random mutation in corn resulted in a multitude of new varieties that decupled the amount of sugar of ordinary corn.

Since this discovery, people have been breeding these new varieties to try and get sweeter and sweeter corns. Nowadays, you'll struggle to find a variety of sweetcorn that isn't "super-sweet" (and, incidentally, less nutritious), signifying its nuclear origins. However, like the bulldog, cross-breeding in search of a few characteristics has left us with a poor fragile cripple that can no longer reproduce on its own. Corn kernels are supposed to be fat and puffy, as they store starch that keeps the seedling going through the long and drawn out germination process. Modern super-sweet varieties have nice tasting sugar where the blah starch used to be - quick energy that doesn't store well and doesn't last long. So the kernels look like this:

The now traditional teaspoon for scale in the background

The above picture is the super-super-sweet Ruby Queen that I've been trying and mostly failing to grow this year and the above theory explains a lot - they're just running out of stored food before they've managed to germinate properly.

2 from 18 isn't a winning strike-rate

This has left me in a bit of a bind though, as I need more than two plants to run my planned Three Sisters bed and it's not possible to mix-and-match varieties. I've planted some fresh Ruby Queen kernels in the hope of getting some more, but there's a fairly good chance that I'll get the same result again. Plus, even if I do manage to get another 2-3 viable plants from this new sowing, the two that have succeeded won't bloody stop growing and any new plant may not mature in time to fertilise the first duo,

Yep, the bloody thing's outgrown the seedling root-trainer before its fellows have even broken the surface. Strikes me as somewhat rude.

When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's bad, it's indistinguishable from a bag of Swift potatoes.

So, plan B has now come into effect. Still a red sweetcorn, but this time less sweet and more savoury and with the bonus of an awesome name - Bloody Butcher. The difference in the kernels is clearly visible.

See the results that you get with the Charles Atlas home bodybuilding DVD. Now only £9.99 for all three discs! The planting that made a seedling out of Sid!

And it seems to be paying off. I sowed nine pots last week and I've already got five seedlings poking their noses above the soil.

The pots on the left are the chard plants to replace those arbitrarily decapitated by the tortured brassica cage last month and which totally aren't my fault for killing.

It's possible that they may not taste quite as good as the Ruby Queen, but if I can get at least six viable plants (enough to do the 3 sisters), then I'll count it as a win. And hey, maybe it'll taste better? I wasn't overwhelmed with the super-sweet sweetcorn that I grew last year - it was nice enough and better than any sweetcorn I've previously had, but as someone who didn't like the sweetcorn he'd previously had, that's damning with faint praise. Maybe something a touch more savoury will hit the mark?

Alternatively, the Ruby Queen has 25 new seed sowings and about two weeks in which to impress me and produce another 4-5 plants. The race is on.

Yes, there have been more boring races than pitting two varieties of sweetcorn against each other; I just can't think of any right now, cause I don't want to. Because shut up, that's why.

PJW