Growing Giant Maize Plants In Scotland Sowing and Early Growth

Welcome to Gardening at 58 North. So in this video I'm going to be trying to grow some giant sweetcorn. Now I probably don't have the climate where I am for it to fully ripen and become edible, but at least I can grow giant plants that'll be interesting to add to the kind of jungle theme of my garden with some giant annuals. So this year what I'm growing is some giant sweetcorn. The variety is called Sweetcorn Mexican White and this one is supposed to go up to 16 feet in height and the actual cobs are supposed to grow to about two foot in length. So this should be a really giant plant when it does grow. Now for it to grow to its full extent it really needs a really warm temperate climate, so somewhere like South Europe or maybe some of the warmer states in America or even pushing into the subtropics and needs a long growing season to get to its full height and full potential. But even though I don't have the right climate I should be able to get a really tall plant. It might not get any ripe cobs on it or any edible sweetcorn, but at least I'll get a really giant leafy plant that'll just add a bit of drama to my garden. So the actual sweetcorn kernels, I wouldn't say they're particularly any bigger than normal. You can see that that's some there. You can tell it's not the super sweet variety because they're not really shriveled. The really sweet varieties tend to have extra shriveled corns, but it'll be interesting to see if it does grow anything that's edible. But these are the kernels that I'll be growing anyway. I'm just going to start with six for now. The reason being these are going to be really big plants, they'll take up a lot of space. I don't really want to have loads of them. Also they're not probably going to get to an edible stage so I'm not growing them for a crop. And the other reason is if I'm starting these a bit too early, I can always do a second batch later on. Because if these do grow really fast and I run out of growing space inside, they might get too big before the last of the frost has gone. Because I'll need to start these inside, have them under grow lamps or a sunny windowsill, and then transplant them outside once the risk of frost has gone. Sweetcorn is a tropical, or almost a tropical plant. It likes very warm growing conditions. If I try and grow it outside and the ground is cold, or we have some cold weather, it's just not going to like it here in my climate and it's going to sit there and not do much. So I'll probably be transplanting this out in June when we have some warmer weather, even maybe the middle or late June. Because early June here we can actually have a touch of frost and it can still be quite cold during the day. So I'll start these now around about mid to late March. And if these grow too big for me to keep contained, then I might have to do a second batch around about April, May time. So because these are quite large seeds and they're fast growing vigorous plants, I'm putting them in a tray here that has quite large planting spaces. So there's just going to be six in this large tray. I'm just going to make the holes there for the seeds. So with them being quite big plants, they'll get going with a good established root system straight away. So I'll need to make sure that they're in a decent sized pot to begin with. If I started them off in very small seed trays, they might not do quite as well. So I'll just start off with this in a slightly larger pot. And because they are giant sweetcorn plants, and sweetcorn grows incredibly fast anyway, what I'll need to do is I'll need to transplant these quite quickly and keep putting them in larger and larger pots until they're ready for transplanting out in the garden. Now sweetcorn is a very fast growing plant. It's one of the C4 plants. So basically there's, you get different types of photosynthesis in plants. And this is the one that has the very efficient photosynthesis, which can grow extra fast in tropical conditions. So I should be able to get some truly phenomenal growth. And especially as this is a giant variety, I would expect the growth to be even faster and better than a normal sweetcorn variety. So what I'll be doing is I'll be putting this in a warm location around about 25 degrees, maybe 30 degrees in a propagator or warm sunny windowsill if I don't have enough propagator space. They should germinate quite quickly, probably one or two weeks. And then what I'll be doing is I'll be keeping it either a really sunny location, or I'll be keeping it under strong grow lamps to get some good strong growth. And I'll give you guys an update in a few weeks time. And the growth should be really quite quick. And we should get some quite nice large seedlings in just a short period of time. So it's just under eight weeks later. And as you can see, the plants are absolutely massive already. As I say, these are giant maize plants. So they're going to grow pretty quickly from the beginning. And they're just going to get faster and faster, more exponential growth as they have more leaves to gather more photosynthesis. So these plants are really quite big now. Now because I'm in North Scotland, I wouldn't normally plant them until about June. It's the middle of May now, but these are so big, I don't really have any space for them inside. If I give them a bigger pot, they're going to get even bigger. And my windowsill height is about the height of these. Even in the conservatory, they start to get a bit tall within probably another few weeks because they're growing so fast. So I'm going to plant them about now. We have had some unusually warm weather recently, so they should be okay. Temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius, which is quite exceptional considering the maximum midday summer temperatures are normally about 18 degrees in July. And it's now May and it should be more about 14, 15 degrees. So it is warmer at the moment. So as long as we don't get a frost, these should be okay. And this week we're going to have quite cloudy, wet weather and not too much wind. So they hopefully should harden off okay. Now I'm going to plant these a little bit deeper than normal. The reason being these do grow buttress roots. So you can see a little bit of the buttress root starting here at the base. What's going to happen is on every node for the first few nodes that it comes up, these roots will come out above the ground and they'll curve down and they just act as buttresses and help to support the plant. So I'm going to plant the plant a little bit deeper than normal. The reason being is it'll give a bit of extra strength. And when these new roots do emerge, they'll be underground in the soil and they can straight away start to root in the ground and give a bit of extra stability. So I'll be planting these just a little bit deeper than normal. And when it came to germination success, I had four that germinated straight away. These two here, these two cells didn't have any germination. So what I did is I put in two new seeds and now these seeds have just started to germinate. So I'll be putting them in the ground later in the year, just in case these bigger ones do get destroyed by the early spring weather if we do have any cold snaps. So I'm just going to go ahead now, plant these in the garden and then I'll see you later in the summer in another video update and I'll just let you know how they've been growing and we'll see how big they get. Now I'm not expecting to get monsters in my garden, even though I've improved the soil to make it as good as possible because the climate I have is a bit cold and also it could be a bit windy for them. But where I'm going to plant them is I'm going to plant them into my bamboo bed. Basically I've made some bamboo beds with some bamboo barrier to stop the bamboo from spreading. But the bamboo is still very young, so most of the bed is currently empty. And because bamboo likes high nitrogen, I've made the soil really rich with lots of nitrogen. So because bamboo is a grass and this is a grass, they both like very similar soil conditions and fertiliser regimes. So I'll be growing them in the same bed, they should do particularly well. Also it's a very sunny part of the garden, but where I'm going to put these, I'm actually going to put them in a slightly shadier bed. It's between a shed and a fence, so it's a bit more sheltered. It is a little bit shady, but it does get some late afternoon sun and just that extra bit of protection from the wind I think is really going to help them. And if they do grow as tall as they're advertised, they should grow a lot taller than my shed and then later in the year they should get maximum sunlight. So that's all for this video and I'll see you guys in a few weeks or a few months later this summer and we'll see how well they've grown.