There are so many benefits that one can get from growing their own vegetables at home. It is great to be able to serve your family garden fresh fruits and vegetable. They are healthy, nutritious and taste great. In this article I’m going to show you how to grow corn.
Corn is one of the staple foods that we eat. We can have them in almost any time of the day, and corn is a great source of many 
Corn can be grown at home with very minimal knowledge and skills. Below are the different ways that you can do, if you want to grow corn at home:
Choosing Your Corn
Know the type of variety of corn that you want to plant. This is because you have to know beforehand if the corn can live in the kind of climate that you have, as well as the PH level of your soil. Good thing that you can do several things to control the temperature where your corn is planted, you can also change the level of the soil’s PH, by just adding agents on the soil.
Most people intend to plant sweet corn, as this type of corn has the most use in most households. You can eat them on the cob, or you can also process them by canning them, to lengthen its shelf life. If you are planning to plant sweet corn, then you might want to check the different varieties of sweet corn that is determined by the level of sweetness that they have. You should check the following signs on the packet:
SU – semi sweet
SE – sugar enhanced
SH2 – super sweet corn
Planting Your Corn
Ideally, the best time to plant corn is when the soil is warm. If the soil is cool or cold, you will end up having rotten seeds. You should also choose an area where the corn will receive full sunlight for quite a number of hours during the day. You might also want to remove the weeds in that area regularly, as corns will have a difficult time growing when they share the nutrients of the soil with the weeds.
Experienced farmers know to plan their crops. Normally, they plant corn after the harvested peas or beans. This is because peas and beans leave a good amount of nitrogen in the soil, which corn plants love. But this does not mean that you have to plant beans before corn. What I am just saying is that you might want to enrich your soil with nitrogen, in order to give the needed nutrients of your corn plant.
Harvesting Corn
When your corn is about 12 inches at the very least, this already means that it is ready for harvesting. Another indication if the corn is already ready for harvesting is if has already developed silky strands of brown hair. Twist the corn and pull them when harvesting.
image courtesy of Meg Stewart/flickr
