Sweetcorn Planting - No More Lone Sweetcorn!
I originally planted a small block of sweetcorn, but BunBuns and Hens were very helpful (!) in scratching up the kernels I’d planted and eating them. Hence, only two lone sweetcorn out of a whole block grew. Sweetcorn needs to be planted in a large block so the plants can pollinate and produce their goods. So I wasn’t really banking on the two plants that did manage to escape the nibbling nibblers to do anything. Yesterday I bit the bullet and decided to CHEAT. Yes, I feel thoroughly ashamed, and I’m not sure why. I bought a tray of young sweetcorn plants from the garden centre and planted them in. They’re probably a completely different variety to the ones that are already half-grown, but nevermind. Hopefully the newbies will do something, and the oldies will attempt to do something.
I don’t know why I feel it’s cheating. I only feel like I’m doing a ‘proper’ job if I grow from seed. It makes me sound a bit like a veg-growing puritan, but I can’t help it! I don’t get the same sense of achievement from sticking in plug veg. It doesn’t feel like it’s been nurtured - in some ways it’s just like buying it from a supermarket because it’s come out of a massive commercial hothouse. But then, I guess this is only where the seeds come from too?
Anyway what’s done is done. For £2.99 I got 34 sweetcorn plants - so if you go on the premise that you yield at least 1 sweetcorn per plant, then that’s about £30 worth of sweetcorn there. At the supermarket it’s around £1.79-£1.99 for 2 cobs, and they come from places like Morocco. So I must be saving a heck of a lot of money, food miles and probably getting better flavour too. That’s if they grow and produce some big cobs.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I bought pepper plants as I failed miserably at growing them from seeds. And my dad bought everything as plants cos he was working loads when he should have been planting seeds and missed the window. He even bought carrot plants. I think life’s too short to feel bad about it, though, as it is still much less cheating than buying it in the shops!! And after all if you’d been a purist and just kept the two sweetcorn plants you’d grown from seed, they’d not have been pollinated, so really you were just doing them a favour…
July 31st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
@Lucy: I know about that feeling of cheating. For me it has got something to do with freedom. If I buy plants I’m in bed with the supermarkets and whatever money making ideas they come up with. Plus I can only pay with money, so I have to make some. Worse is that deep down buying seeds also makes me feel a little ashamed, because it’s not real freedom when we’re dealing with terminator seeds and big money chasing corporations. Hmm, I guess I’m a seed collector wannabe