🔗 Growing My Own Corn
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Ido Perlmuter
First published: .
Table of Contents
Background
Last year I wrote about the arduous hobby of growing my own coffee. The post was a huge success, attracting 0 comments from visitors. People I talk with in real life, however, are often surprised and confused when they hear I grow coffee, given that obtaining coffee is extremely easy. The same is true for maize, a.k.a corn, but I find it strange to question why someone would want to grow the top-produced grain in the world. Growing corn (and coffee) is an extremely common activity, and an ancient one at that. Ears of corn older than 5,000 years have been found in caves in Mexico, and humans have been growing corn in Mesoamerica several thousand years before that. It did, however, only reach Europe and the rest of the world in Columbian times, a bit over 500 years ago. To me, growing corn is a rewarding way of "connecting" with our past.
Despite being the top-produced grain in the world, I find that many people are also completely unaware of how ubiquitous and important corn is to modern society. Practically every person I told about this hobby believed that the only corn that exists is the one you eat fresh, i.e. corn on the cob, a.k.a sweet corn, and many don't even know that popcorn is corn. Although sweet corn and popcorn are grown extensively throughout the world, they are not the most common types of corn.
There are several types of corn, the most common of which are as follows:
- Dent corn is the most heavily produced type of corn. Its name comes from a small indentation that forms at the crown of each kernel as it matures. Dent corn is grown for many different uses: to create ethanol, a biofuel that is commonly added to the gasoline in our cars; to feed livestock; to eat as a cereal, and in food processing. It is often roasted for eating, and a lot of canned corn is actually dent corn, not sweet corn.
- Sweet corn varieties naturally contain a higher sugar content. They are grown for human consumption only, and as opposed to most other types of corn, are harvested early, when the kernels are still immature, also known as the "milk stage". Within the sweet corn category, there are several subcategories such as "sugary", "sugary-enhanced" and "supersweet". Sweet corn goes back centuries, but the sweeter varieties are modern.
- Flint corn is characterized by a hard outer hull and a relatively soft internal starch endosperm, but they are harder than dent corn. The kernels are often multi-colored, making them quite attractive and thus also grown purely for decoration, but they've been grown for food in Mesoamerica for several thousand years. They are often used to make flour and hominy, a common ingredient in grits.
- Popcorn is technically a type of flint corn. The kernels reach a moisture level after drying that allows them to violently expand when heated. It's one of the most popular snacks in the world, and also goes back thousands of years. If you have popcorn at home, you can grind it into flour and use it for baking too.
- Flour corn is characterized by a soft starch endosperm that makes it more suitable for grinding into flour than flint corn. Like dent and flint corns, it is used to make tortillas (and thus tortilla chips), which are extremely common throughout the world, but of course are staples of Mexican cuisine. It is also used to make many other baked dishes, including cornbread and the porridge known as polenta.
To make things more interesting, I decided to grow colorful flour corn and popcorn varieties. My first attempt was in 2025, when I grew a flour corn variety known as Painted Mountain. This variety is extremely popular with home-growers due to its beauty, versatility and adaptability. It tolerates both heat and cold well, and the plants are short, making Painted Mountain growable even on small apartment balconies. I didn't quite know what I was doing back in 2025, but was able to grow five plants in a medium container and get some beautiful ears, although they were shorter than normal for the variety, which is expected given how crammed the plants were in the container. I also grew a popcorn variety known as Mini Pink Popcorn in an even smaller container, but the ears were so small and the kernels so tiny I did not consider it any kind of success. All of the ears I grew in 2025 are still hanging for decoration in my room, I have not used any for food.
This year, however, I was looking to have a much bigger harvest and to use it more for actual food than decoration. The Painted Mountain kernels I used in 2025 came from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, a fantastic source of seeds that also ships to Israel, which is rare. I believe these kernels did not come from Painted Mountain's original creator Dave Christensen in Montana, but rather from a different grower, although their website has recently been updated and it now seems their Painted Mountain seeds do come from him. Last year I was in Montana and took the opportunity to get them directly from the source. Dave has several other flour corn varieties, including the black Montana Morado variety, and a newer variety called Homestead Hero, which is characterized by a high protein content, so I got a packet of that one too. I also got some Glass Gem kernels—a beautiful flint/popcorn variety that is also very popular with home growers—and Hopi Turquouis kernels from Baker Creek.
Sowing
Corn is sown directly into the soil (as opposed to being germinated indoors and transplanted later, like many other plants), about 1-2 inches deep. To maximize my success, I purchased two very large 120L rectangular containers. My original intention was to sow 8 kernels in each of the two 120L containers, and then thin them down to 6 plants per container, but they grew so well that I decided to let them all be. I was also emboldened by my visit to the US the previous year: I spent a month in the corn belt (mostly in Indiana, but also Illinois and Missouri) and made it a point to check how the plants were spaced in the fields, and they were closer than I had expected.
I planted eight Painted Mountain kernels in one 120L container, plus two more in a small-medium container as extra pollen providers. Sometimes corn plants will start growing ears once no pollen remains (I explain more about this later on). The two plants in the smaller container will develop more slowly than the ones in the larger container, giving me more pollen when I need it. Alternatively, I could have sown only some of the kernels at the same time, and the rest later on.
I did the same with the Homestead Hero: eight kernels in the remaining 120L container, two more in a small-medium container. I sowed four Glass Gem kernels in the container I grew the Painted Mountain in last year, and four Hopi Turquoise kernels in a medium square container. Different varieties of corn should be kept as far away from each other as possible to avoid cross-pollination. In my setting this is difficult, so I sowed the varieties at different times to avoid overlap in their pollen shedding windows, and kept actively shedding plants away from the rest. I sowed the Painted Mountain first, the Homestead Hero a week later, the Glass Gem a week after that, and the Hopi Turquoise a week after that.
Growing
Corn is a heavy feeder and needs a well fertilized soil. The soil I use already contains slow-released organic fertilizers, but to maximize success I fed the plants with liquid organic fertilizers from BioBizz, specifically Bio Grow and Alg-A-Mic during the entire life of the plants, and also Bio Bloom and Top Max during flowering.
The corn plant is comprised of a single main stalk with multiple nodes. Long leaves grow out of these nodes, and eventually the ears as well. Corn has an interesting trait: if conditions are right it can grow additional stalks—known as tillers—from the roots of the main stalk. These are often much smaller than the main stalk, but they can grow ears and produce pollen. Painted Mountain is known to produce many tillers, and this year it grew substantial ones, quite thick and tall. Homestead Hero generally doesn't produce tillers, but one of the plants produced two, and they were taller than the main stalk!
Historically, tillers were known as "suckers", because the belief was that they "suck" nutrients out of the main stalk (as is common in plants that grow stems that "compete with the main one"), and were thus often cut off, but today they're known to be beneficial, and since they grow more slowly, they can produce pollen after the main stalks have already stopped, thus rescuing late-forming ears.
Hand Pollinating
After a month or two, the corn will begin to flower. First, tassels emerge from the top of the stalk:
Tassels are male inflorescences (clusters of flowers) that produce pollen. Later on, "shoots" will begin to emerge from the nodes of the stalk:
The shoots are the initial stage of an ear of corn. The number of ears on each stalk changes based on variety and conditions. As the shoots grow, the husk and cob form. After a while, "silk" will emerge from the top of the shoots:
The silks are the female part of the plant. They're bundles of "hair", really tubes that the kernels attach to. Each strand of silk is one potential corn kernel.
Corn is wind pollinated. For a kernel to form, at least one grain of pollen from the tassels must contact that kernel's strand of silk and pollinate it. Wind releases pollen from the tassels and gravity takes care of bringing that pollen in contact with the silk. In a field, corn is planted in blocks to maximize pollination, but in a home setting with a small number of plants, manual intervention is required to get well-formed ears, as the wind can blow all the pollen far away from the silk.
A corn plant can pollinate itself, but it is better to pollinate ears with pollen from other plants. For this reason, corn has developed to shed pollen before silks emerge, about a week or more earlier. This is why it was important for me to have some plants that are late to produce pollen (the ones in the small containers, and the tillers), but in hindsight I should have sown the kernels of each variety with a few days' wait between them rather than all at once.
The corn plant's tassels now begin to produce pollen. Over a period of about a week, the tassels activate "anthers" that shed pollen:
Pollen consists of tiny yellow granules that are easily carried by the wind. It is shed mostly in the morning, when temperatures are comfortable, but also in the late evenings or nights to a smaller degree. Pollen grains are only viable for a few hours. When pollen touches silk, a tube is formed inside the silk from the grain of pollen in towards the kernel, which takes a day or less, depending on the length of the strand and the location of the pollen grain.
To ensure all silks are well pollinated, I manually collected pollen and brushed it on the silks every day during the silking period, and multiple times at that:
Once pollinated, the silks begin to dry and wither, turning brown, first at the very tips and progressing inwards daily. Once dry, the ear becomes vulnerable to moths that specifically target dried silks to lay their eggs, from which corn earworms (the larvae of these moths) will emerge and find their way down into the ears, inside the husks, and feast on the kernels. On my rooftop balcony, which is often too brightly lit even at night, this is a major concern. To combat this, I bought paraffin oil (a type of mineral oil) from a pharmacy and dripped it at the tip of each ear (where the silks emerge out of the husk). Again, this is something you do after the silks have been pollinated and are drying down. For the Homestead Hero and Glass Gem plants, my timing was spot on and I had no earworm damage at all, but for the Painted Mountain my timing must have been off, as I did get earworms in almost every ear, but I caught almost all of them very early, before they reached the kernels. Still, there was some damage.
Other problems can occur too. Sometimes the husks will not form right and part of the cob will be exposed, as this ear shows:
I plan to next year sow kernels I grew this year, and the idea is to save the best ones for sowing. These are the ones that had the most success in my environment (my rooftop balcony gets extremely hot even in winter). I would like to discourage ears that grow out of the husks, so I will not be saving kernels from this ear. Such ears are more vulnerable to pests, and sun exposure can lead to deformities.
You may have noticed in the picture above that the ear is wrapped in a mesh bag. Once pollination was complete and I had done the paraffin oil treatment, I wrapped all the ears in either mesh or breathable paper bags to further protect the ears from pests.
Funny thing about tillers: they are much more prone to atavistic behavior than main stalks. Sometimes, a tiller will form both tassels and silks from the same node (its topmost node). Apparently, this is a remnant of maize's wild ancestor, teosinte. The two tillers that grew out of one of the Homestead Hero stalks and that were taller than the main stalk both did this:
These kernels are otherwise completely normal, but I probably would prefer not to save them for sowing. They are also completely exposed to the elements, making them vulnerable. They do dry much quicker though, so the window of vulnerability is shorter.
Harvesting
I mentioned before that sweet corn is harvested early, in the "milk stage". At that stage, the kernels are bursting with a sugary liquid. Flour corn and popcorn, however, are harvested much later, after all the sugar had been converted to starch and the kernels had dried. This is verified by trying to leave a mark on a kernel with a fingernail. If you can leave a mark, that ear has not dried enough yet.
By the time ears are ready to harvest, the husks had completely dried and turned a light brown, and pretty much the entire plant had died. If no pest or anything else threatens the ears, it's better to let them dry off completely on the plant, even if the kernels are hard enough not to leave a mark. There is no point in watering the plants any more.
Ears are harvested by cutting the shank with which they are attached to the stalk. Industrially-grown corn plants are specifically bred for machine harvest. The varieties I grew are open-pollinated varieties that are only harvested by hand. They are short, which makes harvesting (and pollinating) easier. The Glass Gem, however, is tall. Too tall to be practical in a home setting. I could get away with it on my rooftop balcony, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you have an actual garden with enough space.
My harvest was very successful despite the earworm damage in the Painted Mountain and some disappointment from the four Hopi Turquoise plants that have only yielded two ears, one with some earworm damage. They also produced purple ears when they should have been turquoise.
The colors I got from the Painted Mountain leaned more towards the orange/brown side of the scale, which was fine by me. Two were almost black, which was a nice surprise, and I had some purples, but surprisingly no blues and starbursts this year, as opposed to the previous one.
Drying
Regardless of how early or late you harvest the ears, the kernels are not completely dry yet, and will spoil if stored in an airtight container. Therefore, I hung them up to dry inside after harvesting:
Shelling
Once the ears had dried enough on the cob, I started shelling the kernels and storing them in mason jars with some silica gel packets to continue absorbing moisture.
I had to replace the silica packets several times over the course of the next few days as they continued to draw out moisture from the kernels. I kept all the Glass Gem kernels on the cobs for now.
Using for Food
Now that the kernels have reached their lowest possible level of moisture, they are ready for long-term storage, whether for food or for resowing. Given that I mostly grew flour corn, that's how I plan to use most of them, but there are many other options, such as making parched corn, a snack that is actually quite common in Israeli "pitzookhiyot", stores that sell roasted nuts and seeds.
Here are several things I made with the corn:
Grinding to Flour and Baking Cornbread
Cornbread is one of my favorite things in the world. It is common in American BBQ joints, which is why I know it in the first place. I recently wrote about it in my Favorite Bread Recipes post, which includes a link to my favorite cornbread recipe. This recipe also calls for wheat flour because most cornmeal you buy at the store has hard starches which aren't suitable on their own, but Painted Mountain and Homestead Hero have soft starches that make fantastic, traditional cornbread with no wheat at all, so I skipped the wheat flour and doubled the cornmeal.
To grind corn into flour, one needs a grain mill. I did not want to spend a lot of money on something like this, so I bought a much cheaper grain mill attachment for my KitchenAid:
The cornbread I made from this flour was the best I'd ever made. Delicious and fluffy:
Nixtamalization and Tortillas
While cornbread is made from straight, untreated cornmeal, tortillas are traditionally made from masa — a dough made from wet ground corn kernels that have undergone a process called nixtamalization. Such corn is called "nixtamal" or "hominy", and is also used in many other traditional corn-based dishes, such as grits.
True corn tortillas are rare in Israel. Tres Pesos sells them (and other related items), but pretty much all tortillas you find in the supermarkets are made from wheat flour, even those literally labeled "corn tortillas". If you've ever had tortillas in Mexico or the southwest United States, you probably had tortillas made from masa. Their flavor and aroma are unmistakable.
Nixtamalization is an ancient process Native Americans started performing almost 3,500 years ago. It's quite simple: the corn kernels are boiled in water infused with ashes (such as from burning hardwood or even dried plants) or an alkaline material such as calcium hydroxide (also known as "pickling lime"), then left to soak in the liquid overnight. This makes the kernels more easily ground, increases their ability to bind into a dough, improves their flavor and aroma, improves the nutritional value, and makes the protein more absorbable. The latter was extremely important historically: populations where corn was the staple food suffered from niacin deficiency (pellagra), unless the corn was nixtamalized.
I bought food-grade calcium hydroxide from Amazon and performed the nixtamalization process with all of the kernels from the two Hopi Turquoise ears I got, plus a few brown Painted Mountain kernels. This was very simple: just 30 minutes boiling in the alkaline solution (though I probably should have boiled a bit longer), then I allowed the kernels to soak overnight. The house was filled with tortilla smell, which was encouraging.
After you have nixtamal/hominy, you need to make masa. This means grinding the soaking wet kernels, which I can't do in the grain mill as it will clog the burrs and rust them. Traditionally, a metate was used. This is somewhat similar to a mortar and pestle, except that the former uses horizontal grinding motion while the latter uses vertical crushing motion.
As you can see in the picture above, I intended to use the mortar and pestle to grind the nixtamal, but I abandoned this idea about 10 seconds into the work and moved to a food processor, which is what most online articles call for:
The problem with using a food processor is that you have to add water and scrape the sides all the time to make it grind, which isn't technically what it does anyway, it shreds. Adding water means you get wetter masa, which means you may need to dry it somehow, be it air-drying the dough, adding masa harina (dried nixtamalized corn flour), or praying. I also made the mistake of not reheating the nixtamal and tried to grind it straight out of the fridge, which definitely hurt.
Once I had masa dough, I was ready to make tortillas. I could have bought a tortilla press for that, but it seemed overkill, even though they're not particularly expensive. Instead I split the masa to several golf-ball-sized pieces and flattened them with the bottom of a heavy cast iron pan. Most articles recommend putting each masa ball between two pieces of a plastic bag (such as a ziplock bag) and then pressing them. This proved difficult, the dough kept sticking to the plastic, it seems it was actually too dry. I tried spraying oil, adding water, adding flour; nothing really worked, so I ended up just putting each masa ball directly onto a hot cast iron pan (a different one), then immediately pressed on it with the heavy cast iron pan, on the bottom of which I sprayed some oil, and fried for about three minutes each.
Since I used purple/blue/brown corn kernels, my tortillas came out more like Native American tortillas. Most tortillas you find in Mesoamerica are made from white corn. The taste, however, was spot on, just like how I remember from Mexico and the US, absolutely fantastic.
I ate a few of the tortillas immediately with some grilled ground beef patties, and put the remaining ones in the fridge to use for tortilla chips the next day.
Making Popcorn
Glass Gem corn is a popcorn variety. As I previously mentioned, for popcorn kernels to pop, they need to reach a certain level of moisture. I actually did not expect to succeed in making popcorn at all, but I was quite mistaken. I tried a few kernels in the microwave first, no oil or anything, and they popped nicely, so I tried more. By now I've used about 3 or 4 ears to make popcorn. I simply put the kernels in a silicone microwave popper with a few drops of coconut oil and stick in the microwave on high for a few minutes. Almost all kernels pop beautifully, and the popcorn is very tasty, full of corn flavor, crispy, much better than anything I've ever bought in the supermarket or even got at the cinema.
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