Organic Sweetcorn: Golden Bantam

Description

Organic Sweetcorn: Golden Bantam. Zea mays convar. saccharata var. rugosa.

Sweetcorn Golden Bantam is a delicious sweetcorn, known for its flavour and tender kernels. It is an old heirloom, open pollinated variety.

How to grow:
Sow seeds in pots in April. The best way is to make paper pot liners for inside 8cm pots and when you transplant them at about 10 – 15 cms tall, take the plastic pot away and plant into the soil with the paper, this means the roots are barely disturbed. Transplant out in May after frosts have passed. Sweetcorn doesn’t require much fertilization, and highly fertilized soils will only diminish the sweetness of the fruits. Sweetcorn is wind pollinated so they do best planted in a grid formation together (as opposed to in a line). Good pollination means that more of the kernels will be filled and edible.
Sweetcorn is sometimes known as one of the three sisters. Grown along with beans and courgette or squash the three compliment and help each other in different ways. Method: Transplant the sweetcorn out first, then direct sow the beans (the beans can climb up the corn stems). Once the beans have started to sprout transplant the cucurbits (that you already started under cover earlier) around the corn and beans.
The corn can be harvested when the plumes on top of the corns are turning brown, eat fresh.

Problem solving:
The main problem is getting the kernels pollinated so they fatten up to be the yellow edible parts we recognise. Planting them in a grid formation in a place that will get a breeze fairly regularly is beneficial.

Favourite ways to eat them:
It is important to harvest the corns when you want to cook them and eat straight away. In south America sweetcorn is traditionally eaten with beans, the mix of sweetcorn and beans deliver two important amino acids, each making up in abundance a deficiency in the other and providing a healthy diet. In the Phillipines from street vendors, boiled cobs are served with butter and cheese powder. In Europe we eat them in many ways, barbequed, steamed boiled, canned, often with peas, which again has the good amino acid compliment. In north America they’re often served boiled with butter and salt.

Cultural history:
Sweet corn occurs as a spontaneous mutation in field corn and was grown by several Indigenous peoples of the Native American tribes. The Iroquois gave the first recorded sweet corn (called ‘Papoon’) to European settlers in 1779. It soon became a popular food in the southern and central regions of the United States. Source of ‘Cultural history’ information from Wikipedia.

Avg contents: 25 seeds.