After my post last week, about my poor stunted sweetcorn, the Rocket Gardens team told me that several other customers emailed to say that their sweetcorn was also stunted this year. This spurred me into researching to learn a little more about why sweetcorn might be stunted and not really grow properly during a cool summer.
My learnings are fairly simple, but quite useful to know, I think.
In short, when the soil temperature itself is quite cool (as it normally is in early spring, for example) then the root systems of the plants don’t function properly, and so they don’t draw the nitrogen from the soil. This is true for sweetcorn and also tomatoes (and probably many others, but those were the two that I noticed because my own sweetcorn and tomatoes have both been stunted this year.)
Another thing that I learnt, which may be useful to other growers, is that heavy winter rains can quickly deplete the soil of nitrogen. This is another good reason to mulch, I reckon – to protect the soil beneath the mulch from the heavy rainfall and to add nutrients back into the soil.
It could be interesting, if you’ve struggled with more than sweetcorn this summer, to do a soil test for nitrogen – if it is low, then you’d have the autumn and winter to nourish the soil again ahead of next spring. I’m planning to track down some well rotted manure from a local farm myself – it has been a while since I have added this to my plot, but perhaps it could do with a real boost in nutrients, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m fairly sure that the compost I used this year was poor quality and not at all rich in nutrition.
I hope this may be of help to some of you who have also got some sad, stunted sweetcorn this year – fingers crossed for a warmer summer next year!