Zea Mays

Is there anything quite as satisfying in the dog days of summer as a fresh ear of corn?

Hot off the grill, pulled from boiling water, buried under woodfire embers—however you cook it, corn is one of summer's greatest gifts.

Corn has taken over America's farms. Corn figures into almost every food we see at a typical grocery store, whether it's the feed corn that was given to the pig that became your pork loin, or it's the high-fructose corn syrup that's a preservative in your bread, or it's the wax that makes the other vegetables look shiny.

Corn is not very good for us. There are plenty of reasons to avoid eating it. It's not particularly nutritious, and we are not evolved to eat it in as many ways as we currently do.

And yet....

Corn is ubiquitous. As Michael Pollan has written,

Like the tulip, the apple and the potato, zea mays (the botanical name for both sweet and feed corn) has evolved with humans over the past 10,000 years in the great dance of species we call domestication. The plant gratifies human needs, in exchange for which humans expand the plant’s habitat, moving its genes all over the world and remaking the land (clearing trees, plowing the ground, protecting it from its enemies) so it might thrive.
Corn, by making itself tasty and nutritious, got itself noticed by Christopher Columbus, who helped expand its range from the New World to Europe and beyond. Today corn is the world’s most widely planted cereal crop. 

And yet....

I am faced with a quandary.

I love corn. But I don't want to eat it too often. When I do eat corn, I want it to be amazing. Getting good corn in my neighborhood is a dicey proposition at best. I want it to be organic. Not sprayed with pesticides, not genetically modified. I want it to be super-fresh, the kernels bursting with milky-white sweetness. (Corn notoriously begins to degrade the moment it's picked—the sugars, already slowly converting to starch, begin to convert much more rapidly. There's an old saying to "have the water boiling" when you pick corn to best enjoy the plant.)

This time factor means that even organic farmer's market corn, when I can find it, is going to pale in comparison to something homegrown.

I have considered growing corn in my backyard before—we did it in my family as a kid—but the shadows from the buildings surrounding my garden cut the sunlight down to four hours per day. Corn needs far more than that to prosper. This led me to my great challenge for the summer of 2013:

Growing corn on my rooftop. 

In this blog, I will attempt to document and explain one fantastic experiment in urban gardening: growing 20 cornstalks in a container on the roof of our three-family townhouse in Gowanus, NY. It is my hope that, come August, my family and I will get to feast on the best corn we've ever tasted.

I hope you'll join me on my little journey. Questions, observations, feedback, and advice are all welcome. So long as you're not a hideous spammer.

So let's get into it, shall we? Let's grow organic corn on a rooftop in Brooklyn, NY.