"1 or 2 days after the racoons get it. " I burst out laughing when I read this as I had those exact words on my lips (at the tip of my typing fingers) and that is a very accurate way to tell. The racoons just found my garden this week and the destruction has begun. Last year my husband had complained because I was picking the ears just a tad on the immature side and that is why. They also can tell you when a peach or persimmon crop is nearly ready. I find broken tree branches when the fruit is nearly ripeness where they'd been up sampling like a taster of fine wines.

Raybo - I normally start hand pollinating when the silks are fully emerged and the tassels have plenty of pollen anthers. I continue hand pollinating every evening for about a week. I don't try and grab all the anthers at one time, I might grab a handful from one stalk and then sprinkle that on 4 to 5 ears at a time. I can't really say if what I am doing is overkill or if it is more effective than just shaking the stalks. It is what I have always done and I have had pretty good luck this way. Keep in mind I am only growing 50 to 100 stalks at a time so this is manageable for me. Obviously nature does a pretty good job of pollinating with wind. When you have acres of corn planted wind will work because no matter where the pollen blows it will hit a silk. Hope this helps.

Um, your basic problem was you grew 'Early Sunglow' -- a pretty reliable early variety that's been around forever, but its culinary merits are pretty lacking. Tends to be kind of flavorless, mushy, blah. In other words, I'm trying to say in a humorous way that you didn't do anything wrong, really, the variety is just a dog in terms of culinary quality. It is possible that yours was maybe starting to get on the old side when harvested if "mealy", older kernels beginning to convert to starch can still contain "milk". These SU varieties tend to have a much shorter shelf life, on the stalk or in the refrigerator, than the newer SE and especially the Sh2 and synergistic varieties. I recall 'Sugar Buns' as being better than average for an early corn, but still not as good as main season. Really, of the early corns I've dabbled with, early was the good part of the equation, but none of them were very impressive in terms of taste or texture. Don't feel too bad about it, I've been there. I grew Early and Often from Burpee last year, and it did really well, large nice ears, productive, and tasted awful, like field corn. I didn't trash it, but I marked the frozen packages and reserved for use in things like enchilada casserole filling where it would basically just be filler and the flavor would be hidden by the spices. My future approach to attempting any early crop would be to use my regular varieties such as Sun and Stars from Burpee, and start them extra early in 4" pots, then use season extending techniques like black plastic mulch and row covers for added spring heat. But I didn't get that far this year with the weird early spring and everything popping fast, other garden chores took too much time.

Suzie, I plant Early Sunglow sweet corn every year for my early corn, normally planting the seed as soon as possible after the danger of frost has passed. Because it has such a short DTM, it usually produces a harvest by Memorial Day weekend. Both the plants and ears are small, but then most early corn varieties do produce small ears. I buy the seed right off the rack some years, but at the farm stores where I find it, it often sells out pretty early. I'm guessing that is because it is used by a lot of people fort their early corn since it can withstand late freezes and frosts to some degree.. One huge advantage of early corn is that it often matures ears even before the corn earworms and European corn borers arrive. I think I have seen Early Sunglow on the seed racks at either Lowe's, Home Depot or Wal-Mart this year, but not lately. If you have to order it, you normally can find it online at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. The reason corn is planted in blocks is that it is wind pollinated and the pollen spreads around best when corn is planted in blocks of at least four rows. When you grow corn in one long row, pollination often is poor and when you harvest the ears, they may or may not have lots of kernels. Instead of planting one long row along the edge of a garden, just plant 4 shorter rows all together in a block. Be advised that if you have raccoons around, they love, love, love corn. In our earlier years here, I normally could get Early Sunglow to maturity before the raccoons even figured out I was growing corn. In more recent years, that has not been the case. One problem with the coons is that they will pick an ear, take a few bites of it and then discard it and eat part of another ear and apparently they do that all night long. It is not unusual for them to destroy dozens of ears in one night. Even worse, they won't wait for it to ripen, often pulling the ears 5-7 days before they'd be ready for a human being to harvest them, so you have a very slim chance of beating them to the corn. Most people who live near me in an admittedly rural area with high levels of wildlife have either given up planting corn altogther, or surround it with an electric fence to keep the raccoons out. I grow mine in a corn cage....a fenced garden just for the corn that has a poultry netting 'roof' to keep the raccoons out. This year in one of the new gardens I am going to plant corn without a corn cage or an electric fence. I am going to surround it with a double row of milk thistle plants in the hope that their big prickly leaves will keep the coons out of the corn. There are few things better than fresh corn on the cob. I like to harvest it and take it right inside and cook it and eat it right then. Since I plant a lot, some of it always does end up in the freezer. And, now that I have gotten better at fighting the raccoons, less and less of it ends up in their tummies. One of our neighbor's relatives had a corn patch that was a quarter mile long (I don't know how wide) and raccoons still got every ear. Another neighbor's brother trapped and shot raccoons every single night...18 raccoons in 18 nights....in order to protect his corn and save his harvest and he still got zero ears. Corn is very popular with squirrels and other wildlife too, so be aware of that. Often you won't have an issue the first year, but in subsequent years, as they discover what you're growing, you'll have to fight them for every single bit of it. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Early Sunglow's Description at SESE