Grow it! Grain
(Page 3 of 11)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
CORN
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It's corn that is as American as apple pie, not apple pie. Apples are a European crop. Corn not only originated in the Americas, but most early American civilizations were based on it. The Aztec, the Inca, and the Mayan were all corn cultures in the same way that the Khmer is a rice culture and the European a wheat culture. Even today it is a keystone crop of Western hemisphere agriculture. But it's not the same sweet corn you grow in the vegetable garden. Field corn is grown for its storage quality; if you try to boil it up for dinner, you'll be very disappointed. Still, if its woody flavor doesn't appeal to you, the livestock love it.
Corn is a highly developed annual grass. It has been so domesticated into a superproducer, in fact, that it can no longer survive in the wild state. Wild corn is extinct.
The corn plant is composed of a tall tapering stem as thick as one and a half inches at the base and as tall as eighteen feet in the case of some hybrids grown under ideal conditions. Rooting is strong, particularly the development of brace roots when the plant reaches its maximum growth. However, corn roots do not improve the soil. The crop is very hard on soil in general. Never plant a field to corn unless it has had two years of another crop in rotation.
ADAPTATION
Although corn is of tropical origin, it does well in subtropical and temperate climates. It's the summer temperatures that count. Since it is an annual, even subzero winters will have no effect simply because the plants aren't around during that time of year. They're seeds in your grain bin.
Enough moisture is the big problem with corn. Almost any soil will do, but if the rainfall is insufficient, the plant will not thrive. This is particularly important during flower fertilization. Your corn crop will do best if there is a fair amount of rain the four weeks before silking...the stage of development where pollen appears on the tassels topping the stalks and the silks appear on the incipient ears of corn. Rain a few weeks later will give it an extra boost.
TYPES
Corn comes in two basic colors: white and yellow. Since yellow corn contains much more vitamin A, it's preferred. Multicolored corn, known as "Indian corn," is usually grown only for decoration, although you will sometimes find freckled ears in other varieties. Corn is usually classified by its type of kernel and starch.
Dent Corn. The most widely cultivated. Each kernel is composed of both hard and soft starches. The soft is in the center and toward the top. It shrinks upon drying and the distinctive dent forms at the top of the kernel. For a change, try dent corn instead of popcorn some winter evening. It won't explode, but will rupture more gently, the kernel about doubling in size. Heated up in oil like popcorn, it's known as "parched corn", and tastes like those delicious, crunchy, half-popped pieces you used to get toward the bottom of the popcorn bag at old grade-B movies.
Flint Corn ("Indian Corn"). Grown in cooler climates and high altitudes because of its early-maturing quality. Kernels contain soft starch in the center with a coating of flint-hard starch all around. Variegated kernel coloration. Flour Corn ("Squaw Corn"). The all-soft starch of the kernels lends itself to flour milling, just like wheat, although it will be a rougher flour. It is also known appropriately enough as "soft corn". White and/or blue kernels.
Pod Corn. A primitive corn in which each individual kernel is enclosed in a pod, or husk. A very leafy plant often used as forage corn.
Popcorn. What makes this corn the stormy evening fireside companion it's famous as is its hard endosperm, or outer covering. When the corn, with a moisture content of roughly 12 percent, is heated, the endosperm prevents the water vapor from escaping. As pressure builds up, this outer cover ruptures with a pop.
Sweet Corn. What you raise in your vegetable garden, not for the animals...unless you feel extravagant. Kernels are translucent and smooth, and contain sugar as well as starch. Much of the sugar is broken down within a few hours of picking, which is why from-the-stalk-to-the-boiling-pot sweet corn makes the supermarket variety taste like rejects from a birdfood manufacturer.
Waxy Corn. The endosperm is composed of a starch with a waxy appearance, particularly when cut. It is an industrial corn in the sense that the cornstarch derived from it is used primarily for making adhesives and sizing for textiles and papers.
Hybridization has expanded the choice even further, and is the main thrust behind the phenomenal corn yield increases in the last decades. However, if you're thinking of growing a hybrid corn, note that you cannot save the seeds from a double hybrid, that is, one produced by crossing four corns instead of the two used in common hybridization, for future planting. The seeds from double hybrids will not grow true. There's something about double-crossing that makes them revert to type. Most of the corn planted today is hybrid, and even single-crossed varieties grow best from primary seed stock, or that produced by the actual hybridization. So if you want to plant your next year's corn from this year's seed, you'll have to do some shopping around for nonhybrid seed.
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