compost and sweetcorn

When we dug bed 9 in our lawn, we only finished it in late spring, and started to barrow in compost from the compost heap. But time was against us, the plants to go in had started to out grow their pots, and we were only halfway across the bed with compost before we decided we had to plant or lose  them.  We figured, it was a new bed, the lawn had been double dug in, it would be fine. And it is. but..

As you can see from the above picture, the compost line stops halfway through the sweetcorn sowing. Clearly the plants with compost are growing much faster than the ones without, yet they all went in at the same time. It’s worked out like an experiment, proving the usefulness of compost!

This would be a nuisance with sweetcorn, as ideally it is sown in a block to aid pollination and setting of the seeds to make the cob, but fortunately this crop is baby sweetcorn and does not matter, as you don’t want the kernels to form, and in fact staged planting and harvesting is useful.  The photo was taken some weeks ago, and the taller plants are now much taller than me, each with three or more baby corn cobs.  We had the first the other day, but they did not make it off the veg patch, scoffed in a moment.

Today we harvested more, and actually got as far as steaming them lightly.. before scoffing. I’m not convinced they are the best harvest, might be better to have more ordinary sweetcorn, particularly as our large sweetcorns have struggled some being blown over and some being attacked by slugs eating the silks, but the taste of these fresh baby sweetcorn, both raw and steamed is lovely. Just as homegrown corn on the cob is so much better than shop bought, home grown babycorn is sweeter and crunchier than shop too. Delicious.