Early Sunglow is the only thing I ever had luck with. My great-grandpa used to plant it also.

I love Early SunGlow precisely because it is early and dependable. I've had good luck with lots of other corn varieties planted for later corn, but the later it matures, the more you have to fight the corn earworms and European corn borers for every ear of it. I grow Country Gentleman for Tim and Chris because they really like its flavor a lot. Often I grow Texas Honey June instead of Country Gentleman but this year is Country Gentleman's turn. And, of course, we have to plant our sweet corn so the ears will mature before we get insanely hot since temperatures in the 90s at pollination time can result in poor tip fill on the ears. I'd grow more varieties all summer long if it wasn't for the heat issues and for the fact that the later corn crops have so much more trouble with pests. Our corn usually is done by late June, but I do freeze tons of it for us to eat later.

early bantam sweet is good 'nuf for us.

Any and every sweet corn variety I've ever grown has done well for us as long as we got pollination/fertilization of the ears before the temperatures starting hitting the mid- to upper-90s. Corn is easy. Most corn tastes great. So, it really all comes down to just choosing a variety you like. I've liked pretty much every variety I've grown, so I guess my taste buds aren't picky. Too many of the really new supersweet corns, though, have plenty of sweetness but lack old-fashioned corn flavor. I tend to stick with both Texas Honey June and Country Gentleman because they have corn flavor and aren't excessively sweet. Early SunGlow is really sweet, but we like it because it is really early. The big battle is with earworms and European corn borers in June and with stink bugs in later June and throughout the rest of the summer. Oh, and with coons. I think I've largely solved the coon problem, or maybe Mother Nature solved it for me with the huge canine distemper outbreak several years ago, followed by the repeated Red River flooding of 2015 and 2016. We've hardly had any coons getting into the corn since then, but I'm sure that as the population rebounds over the next few years, the coon-corn wars will resume.

I would love to grow some sweet corn again but it is just a deer and raccoon magnet in my unfenced garden. I don't have much trouble with critters in the garden unless I grow corn. The last time I grew Ambrosia the deer and raccoons really seemed to enjoy it though :(

I am considering putting up a fence around all of my raised beds or just fence in a smaller in ground area just for corn.

I would really like to try 'Gotta have it' which is a supersweet exclusive to Gurneys. It gets a lot of rave reviews. Gurneys is pretty proud of the seed but they have it on sale for 1/2 price right now. $4.50 for a 200 seed packet, $20 for 1/2 lb., and $50 for 2 lbs.

Luckily for me, I have a farmer friend that plants about an acre of sweet corn every year and I get about 15 dozen from him for fresh eating and freezing. Usually he plants Ambrosia and/or Silver Queen. I may try to talk him into trying some 'Gotta have it' this year. He would probably do it if I buy the seed.

Jay, who used to post here pretty regularly, used to grow Gotta Have It and spoke highly of it.

At one point, I had to grow my corn in a corn cage, which is a fenced garden spot with a fencing roof firmly attached to all 4 fence sidewalls, to keep the coons out. Otherwise they'd just climb the fence and get the corn anyway. And, you had to be careful---if ears grew too close to the fence, they'd reach through the fencing's openings and tear the ears off the plants. Growing within a corn cage worked but it was a PITA as it limited me to only the space within the cage. Electric fences work poorly here because the deer and other roaming wildlife tend to pull them out of the ground, or plants make contact with them and ground them out or they start fires. It is hard to effectively use an electric fence here in a grassland prone to large grassfires just because of the risk involved. Otherwise, I'm sure I would have gone with an electric fence....but, then again, we go to so many house fires and barn fires nowadays that started when electric fencing nearby made contact with dry vegetation that at this point I wouldn't use an electric fence. We used one in Fort Worth to break a dog of a bad habit of digging under the wooden stockade fence, but we were in the city with lush, green grass, not the dry fields that surround us here.

In the back garden, I've had better luck keeping the coons out of the overall garden. The fence is 8' tall but sort of tilts outward at the top, making it harder for coons to get over the top of the fence. To ensure that the coons didn't get the corn when I planted it back there, I grew milk thistle plants (big prickly things) all round the perimeter of the corn bed. I could step over the milk thistle plants, but the coons wouldn't climb over them or through them. Unfortunately, milk thistle needs really well drained soil (which we have out back) and low rainfall. The milk thistle plants thrived in hot dry years and perennialized and even reseeded, but then they all rotted and died in a wet summer.

A friend of mine said his brother lost his entire corn planting to coons one year...and it was 8 or 10 rows that ran a quarter-mile in length. Another friend whose brother lives even closer to the river than we do tried to save his corn one year by trapping coons and killing each coon he trapped. He trapped 18 coons in 18 nights, and still lost every single ear of his very large (either a half-acre or acre, I no longer remember) corn planting to the coons.

The whole thing with coons is that they'll eat the corn before it is mature, so they tend to strike 4 or 5 days before a human even would think of harvesting the corn, and they also will take a bite or two from each ear and then toss it on the ground. I wouldn't mind sharing the corn with them if they'd take an ear and actually eat it, but all they do is sample tons of ears per night, wiping out even a large crop pretty quickly. Deer never bothered our corn, even when we had a short garden fence, but maybe it was just that the coons beat them to it.

Same here on them taking the corn a few days before it was ready.

I think my raccoons were hitching a ride on the backs of the deer so they could reach the ears because my stalks were not getting pulled down but the ears were gone.

My farmer friend 'hides' the sweet corn in the middle of a patch of field corn and times it so the sweet corn will tassel before the field corm (Ambrosia) or after (Silver Queen). Since one is a SE and the other an SU it really shouldn't matter. He still loses some but I think the raccoons don't find it because the field corn around it is not yet ready but the sweet corn is. Now that I think of it, I guess this method would not work with a super sweet SH2 like Gotta Have it because it requires isolation.

My Dad grew field corn when I was growing up and every year about the time the corn would get in the milk stage he would come in with a big arm load of ears of corn and my mother would boil them and we eat them with butter and salt and I thought corn couldn't get any better. I also like it a little chewy. I didn't know what sweetcorn was until I was nearly grown. Now days everyone wants sweetcorn that taste sweet. I met a man while looking over the seed display at Wal-Mart who told me that his wife and her family put sugar in the pot when they boiled their sweetcorn because they couldn't find any sweet enough. Yuk! I don't think I could handle this. I used to plant Iochief a long time ago and thought it was good, the last few years I have been planting Peaches & Cream, but I may just kind of like fresh corn.

Before the PETA people stopped it, there were a lot of people that hunted the coon for their hides and could sell them. I think it might have helped to keep their numbers down a little, but now they are over populated. The same with Coyotes, I can't keep chickens or grow a watermelon here for them.

Raccoons, right? That's what I thought, but you're suggesting that they won't strip the whole ear, just nibble and toss...whereas these were picked clean on the vine

I've had friends who hide the sweet corn within an outer planting of field corn that way, Jack, and I think it is ingenious but I don't grow field corn. I think you could make it work with a supersweet by using time isolation, but you'd have to find the latest field corn available with a super-late DTM to make it work.

autheray, I think that field corn was what we had growing up because it had a real corny flavor to it, not the sweetness that most corn has today. Of course, it turned starchy so quickly that you practically have the pot of water boiling before you picked the corn, but that wasn't really a problem---it just involved planning ahead. I like sticking with the old varieties I grow (other than SunGlow for earliness) because we want corn that still tastes like corn. I cannot imagine boiling corn in water to which sugar has been added----Americans are addicted to sugar and most eat far too much sugar as it is.

Coon hunting still is a big deal here in our rural area. Last year a guy who apparently lives up the road a couple of miles asked if he could bring his dogs and hunt coons on our property at night, but we said no. We just don't want anyone with guns running around in our woodland at night.

Coyotes are a never-ending problem here too. Ranchers here still shoot them, and often hang their carcasses on their fences to deter other coyotes from feeling safe to run their property at night. No matter how many coyotes the ranchers shoot every year to protect their baby animals, there's still tons and tons more. This past year has been the worst coyote year in ages and ages. I hope the population has peaked and is about to decline because they are causing so many problems lately. Our son's chicken coop is closer to the woodland than ours is and his chickens kept free-ranging into the woodland last summer and fall instead of coming up into the grassland areas with our chickens. He lost the majority of his chickens while we only lost a few of ours. The good news is that the coyote that I was chasing out of our woodland beside the house almost daily last year hasn't been seen here in at least a month, so I suspect something happened to that one. There's still plenty more, but most are not as bold as that one. I would look out the window and it would be coming out of the woodland and into the front yard in the middle of the day even in the summer. All I had to do was open the front door and it would take off, but I didn't like having it lurking around so close to the house.

fitzjennings, I have had coons eat whole ears and leave them on the plant like that at time, but the more typical behavior I see here is as described where they sample a bunch of ears. Sometimes they break them off the plants, sometimes they leave them on, or at least halfway attached, to the plants. I hate coons. They make getting a good corn crop a big challenge. Do you have squirrels? They can be a problem with corn as well. My best success in defeating the coons is just to plant the earliest variety available and to plant it as early as the weather allows. If I plant Early Sunglow in March, we harvest it in May. The coons usually don't expect corn until June, so often we harvest the Early Sunglow before the coons even start looking for corn.

Dawn