At home with Jackie
When towering maize crops grew from Jackie’s horse manure mulch, she made the most of it
The first large garden I ever grew was mulched with manure from a racing stable. As I forked up load after load into a green truck, the grooms joked that I’d have the fastest vegetables in Australia. Most of the pile of stable tailings was months old, but some was fresh. And the seeds in some of the horse droppings were still viable, because about three months later, what I thought were sweetcorn seedlings began to poke up across the vegetable area. They grew, and grew. They kept on growing until they were almost twice as tall as I was, each thick stem having long, pointed cobs – not just one or two per plant, but three or four, or even more. I’d never had a crop like it.
I pretty much lived off the vegie garden back then. I picked the first cobs just as the kernels had formed, still pale green, and boiled them. They were delicious, tender and sweet. The next lot I harvested were turning yellow, and were not so tender, but still good. Two weeks later, the cobs were filled with rich yellow kernels, each hard enough to break a tooth. I had accidentally grown maize, not sweetcorn!
Maize is closer to the original wild corn, bred to give lots to make cornflour, polenta and corn syrup, as well as hundreds of other corn-based products, including stud mix and other animal feed.
If you want to eat maize boiled without needing a visit to the dentist, you must pick the cobs young, when their tassels are still green. Once maize cobs are fully mature, you need to grind, crack or pound the kernels, or process them in one of the many other ways devised for maize crops.
Maize is an excellent crop if you want to grow your own chook feed, although once the kernels are hard and dry, you need to crack the corn before giving it to the hens. I put our dry maize kernels into the food processor for a few seconds to break them up.
Blend them for longer or use a flour grinder if you want fine cornflour, or a coarser mix for cornbread or polenta. Cracked maize is excellent in slow-cooked soups or stews. Treat it like dried beans, which need long, slow cooking to be tender.
Maize used for flour or animal feed keeps for years if you let it dry, unlike sweetcorn. Leave the cobs on the plant until the stems die. An old trick is to push each cob so it points downwards, so the rain washes off while the cobs are drying, and the kernels inside don’t rot.
pollination success
My accidental maize grew so well because of the richly manured soil. Like sweetcorn, maize needs frequent feeding to grow tall and produce many fat cobs. Also, grow it in a clump, not in one or two long rows. Corn is wind pollinated, so growing plants close together means you should get better pollination. Scattered kernels with empty spaces comes from poor pollination.
A warning: if you keep your own corn seed, don’t grow maize and sweetcorn together, as they may cross pollinate. Their offspring will be edible but unpredictable. Most red, purple and multicoloured corn varieties are a form of maize: gorgeous to look at, but tough to eat unless treated.
You’ll never get sweetcorn succulence from maize, no matter how young it’s eaten. But you will get perhaps four times the crop, or even more, and maize is often more tolerant of heat and drought than sweetcorn. You’ll also feel extremely smug every time someone looks over the fence at your crop towering way above head height, and exclaims, “Wow!”