"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...

In article ,
Martin writes:
| On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 23:56:52 +0100, Klara
wrote:
|
| Being brought up on maize, I like sweetcorn
| rather riper than is the taste in this country. It won't get
| too ripe to eat as sweetcorn gere, because we don't get
enough
| sun to ripen it properly.
|
| Don't they say it takes 100 days of sun to ripen corn?
|
| That's about right, but I didn't know that they said it!
|
| 'They' being, if I remember right, US seed packets, yonks ago.
|
| Our sweet corn ripens every year without any problems. Shouldn't
you
| be sowing a variety of sweet corn that was specially developed
for use
| in northern Europe? http://www.agri-saaten.de/english/mais5.htm

Reread the above again. Sweetcorn is corn eaten unripe. Field
corn as grown in northern Europe is also used unripe. Ripeness,
for a seed such as maize, is such that it will keep over the
winter and germinate the next year. I doubt very much that you
sow using the seed that you saved from the previous year!

Back in 1950, corn needed c. 120 days from sowing to full ripeness.
And that 120 days was assuming weather comparable to the hotter
and sunnier of our summer days. Modern varieties probably need
only 100, but the same applies. It is an extremely unusual year
when we get more than 50 such days.

If you attempt to cook ripe maize as sweetcorn, it will take ages
to cook, and be completely unpalatable. As I said, corn will not
reach that stage in the UK, as we don't get enough sun. Germany
gets slightly more, as may be seen by the superiority of German
wines to English ones.

Normalised to equal cultivated areas, English wines win far more first
prizes at blind tastings than German wines do.

Franz