I grew 240 sweet corn plants - And this is what I have to show for it!
There is something almost comical about this photo.
This spring, I planted 240 corn plants.
Two hundred and forty.
In my head, I could already see the harvest. Baskets overflowing with beautiful golden cobs. Corn for summer dinners, corn for the freezer, corn for soups and stews during winter. Perhaps even enough that, by September, I would be wondering what on earth I was going to do with all of it.
Well.
Here is what I have to show for it.
A few freezer bags of kernels and one bag of small, rather unimpressive cobs.
Gardening has a wonderful way of keeping you humble.
It started with such promise
The corn went into the ground at the end of April, and initially everything looked promising.
I had planted a lot because corn is one of those crops where quantity actually helps. It is wind-pollinated, so rather than planting one long row, I planted it in blocks. With 240 plants, pollination certainly wasn't something I expected to worry about.
And for a while, the plants looked fantastic.
They shot upwards, creating that wonderful green wall that makes a vegetable garden suddenly look incredibly productive. Walking past hundreds of corn plants rustling in the breeze made me feel rather pleased with myself.
I had visions of a serious corn harvest.
Then summer arrived.
And apparently summer had other plans.
An exceptionally hot summer
Reading back, the post I wrote about growing sweet corn back in august, "Hello August! The corn is growing" It almost makes me laugh out loud at my plans...
Summers here in inland Catalonia are always hot. That's not exactly news.
But there is hot, and then there is day after day of relentless heat.
Temperatures repeatedly climbed into the high 30s, sometimes around 40°C. The soil dried astonishingly quickly, and keeping the vegetable garden watered became practically a part-time job.
Corn is a thirsty crop at the best of times. But water becomes particularly important when the plants are tasselling, producing silks and filling their cobs.
Unfortunately, that crucial part of the growing cycle coincided with some of the worst heat.
I watered.
And watered.
And watered some more.
But there is an enormous difference between keeping a plant alive and giving it ideal growing conditions.
My corn survived.
It just didn't exactly thrive.
Lots of plants doesn't necessarily mean lots of corn
This was probably the biggest lesson of the whole experiment.
I had 240 plants, so surely even a mediocre harvest from each plant would still give me mountains of corn?
Apparently not.
Some plants produced tiny cobs. Others produced cobs that never filled properly. Some kernels developed beautifully while others remained empty, giving me those rather strange patchy ears that are usually a sign that pollination or growing conditions weren't quite right.
And many plants simply didn't produce anything worth harvesting.
When I finally started pulling the cobs, there was an increasingly ridiculous disconnect between the enormous patch of corn I had spent months growing and what was actually going into my basket.
Two hundred and forty plants.
I feel the need to keep repeating that number. 🤣
But I wasn't throwing it away
The cobs might not have been supermarket-perfect, but plenty of the kernels were perfectly good.
So I sat down and cut every usable kernel from the disappointing ears.
And this is the result.
My grand 2026 corn harvest.
A handful of bags of corn in the freezer and a few small cobs.
Is it slightly tragic?
Yes.
Am I also ridiculously pleased that I managed to salvage something from it?
Absolutely.
Because those freezer bags aren't just corn. They are food that grew in my garden during one of the most difficult summers I've experienced here.
And that counts for something. The garden taught me something this year
It's very easy to look at gardening online and think that every seed should eventually become a beautiful harvest. We see the basket of tomatoes.
The perfect pumpkins. The enormous cabbages.
The wheelbarrow overflowing with corn.
What we don't see nearly as often is someone standing in September looking at a few plastic bags and thinking:
"I grew 240 bloody plants for THIS?" 🤣
But this is gardening too.
Some years you have so many cucumbers that you're canning jar after jar and wondering whether you've completely lost your mind.
Some crops surprise you by thriving despite the heat.
And occasionally you dedicate a huge section of the garden to something that produces almost nothing.
That's not necessarily failure. It's information.
What I'll do differently next year
I'm definitely growing corn again.
Possibly not 240 plants. 😂
Next year I want to concentrate less on the sheer number of plants and more on giving a smaller crop better conditions.
That means improving the soil with more compost and organic matter so it holds moisture better, mulching much more heavily before the real summer heat arrives, and making sure irrigation reaches deeply into the root zone rather than simply keeping the surface damp.
And if another extreme heatwave arrives during pollination, I will know that this is the moment when the corn needs particularly close attention.
I've also learned something more fundamental about gardening in this climate: the varieties and techniques that work beautifully in a mild summer aren't necessarily the ones that will carry you through an extreme Mediterranean one.
Every season here seems to teach me a little more about what this piece of land can—and cannot—do.
So was growing 240 corn plants worth it?
Strangely enough, yes.
Not because of the harvest.
If we're calculating the value of those freezer bags based on the hours I spent sowing, planting, watering, weeding and harvesting them, they are probably the most expensive corn kernels in Catalonia. 😂
But gardening isn't only about efficiency.
I learned where corn struggles in my garden. I learned just how much water 240 plants require during extreme heat. I learned that keeping a crop alive isn't the same thing as giving it what it needs to produce well.
And I learned that even when a crop goes spectacularly wrong, there is usually something worth bringing into the kitchen.
So these little bags are going into the freezer.
This winter, when I throw a handful into a soup or stew, I suspect I'll remember standing outside in 40-degree heat with a hose in my hand, desperately trying to keep 240 corn plants alive.
And next spring?
I'll probably look at my seed packets, completely forget the suffering and plant far too much corn again.
Because apparently that's what gardeners do. 🌽😂
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