This week I picked the last dozen ears of sweet corn and froze it. It held well on the stalk, but was beginning to lose a bit of its sweetness. It was still very good, but more ordinary than what I like to put on the table as "corn on the cob". I again got four dozen from one raised bed. I had thinned the plants down to about 65 plants. Some plants tried to produce a second ear but they were later and didn't amount to anything so I removed them from the plants. There were also some plants that just didn't produce early enough and those ears (about a dozen) were late to the pollination game so I composted them as well.
You can see that these ears are quite mature. We prefer them that way because the flavor is more developed. The pollination was absolutely excellent. We had eaten three dozen ears as corn on the cob, which was as much corn as we wanted for several weeks. The husks on these was actually beginning to fade to tan. Picked at the last minute. This stage is perfect for cutting off the ears and went right into the freezer. They say this variety, Gotta Have It, and sH2 super-sweet hybrid variety, retains its flavor in the refrigerator for three weeks. That would have been an interesting experiment had my fridge not been full of cucumbers! From Gurney's website:
Gotta Have It has tender kernels with a rich, oh-so-sweet flavor and an incredibly long shelf life – over 3 weeks when refrigerated in its husk! The kernels are slow to get starchy, and they retain their sweet flavor even when frozen. The flavor holds up for a wide range of maturity, so you have a longer window of harvest than with many other corn varieties. The 7-1/2 ft. tall plants are shorter than the average corn, but just as strong as field corn. If given enough room, it will produce up to 3 ears per stalk. It's a very productive variety.
I have heard that farmstand corn in our area is between 70 cents and a dollar an ear this year. Here in my garden it certainly was a good year for sweet corn.
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