I've been growing sweetcorn for umpteen years and have been reasonably happy with them. I've always grown F1 hybrids for two reasons, one because the seed is quite expensive that I wanted to make sure they performed as expected and most seed catalogues only have F1 seed for sale anyway. All my plants produced 2 cobs per plant, one good one and the second one sometimes a bit "gappy", and I thought that was normal.
Now that seemingly all modern sweetcorn is either "supersweet" or "tendersweet" which are far too sweet for my liking, and my drive to save my own seed where possible, I looked around for open pollinated heirloom varieties.
This year I'm growing my normal F1 Sundance and the heirloom Golden Bantam, in separate tunnels (no cross pollination)
The Sundance is performing as expected, they are about 4 foot tall and have 2 ears forming.
The Golden Bantam is trying it's hardest to punch holes in the polytunnel roof, they are about 8 feet tall and bent over, so could be even taller. But the most striking thing is one in particular has 7 cobs forming, and has 3 side shoots (called tillers I believe) and they have each got 2 cobs forming as well)
Of course it's early days yet, but it's possible that this one will have 13 cobs. All the others are similar, but not quite so many side shoots (mainly because I pulled them off, thinking they would sap the plants) and 1 or 2 less ears on the main stem.
I'll let you know what I eventually harvest from both varieties,
