(upbeat music) >>Corn is the quintessential American vegetable and grain.

It's been grown in this continent for thousands of years and it's a favorite on backyard barbecue menus and family get-togethers for the 4th of July.

Whether you're growing sweet corn or you're growing a grain corn, like flour corn, for grinding and creating masa, you wanna make sure that you've got several conditions present.

You have to have enough corn in that area to be able to properly pollinate your plants and you want to be able to have good, healthy plants, so feeding is very important.

They are heavy feeders of nitrogen.

So when you plant densely, like you see here, you're going to need to probably amend your soil a little bit.

I like to plant densely, because in Central Virginia, we get a lot of wind.

Unlike other vegetables, corn won't tap down into the soil.

The brace roots come out at the bottom, but where that kernel is in the level of the soil, it is never gonna get deeper than that.

So make sure you're planting deep to try to offset the wind that we have.

We wanna make sure that they are nice and healthy before they silk out and tassel out, because each of those silks is going to take up pollen from those tassels, and each one creates a kernel, which is why you need to have enough plants and enough wind pollination to get really good, juicy, delicious corn cobs.

If you wanna plant more than one variety of corn and you don't want them to cross-pollinate, maybe you don't have a lot of space in your garden, don't worry about it.

You can separate by time.

Corn will only silk out and tassel out for about 10 to 14 days during the course of its maturity.

So you would choose varieties that have the same days to maturity, like these two here, and you're gonna plant them about three weeks apart.

That way, there's no chance of cross-pollination, so you're going to get true-to-type corn cobs from each variety throughout your growing season.

I generally plant about five varieties a year.

In Virginia, we have a great, long growing season for corn, depending on the variety, so I can squeeze those in very early and very late into the year, planting as late as August for some varieties.

And these ones, you can see they're in totally different stages of growth.

This is a Peruvian variety from the Andean Mountains.

It's a beautiful speckled variety.

Kind of short 'cause it's pretty cold in the mountains.

And then this, that's quite a bit bigger in the back, is Glass Gem Corn, and it is about three weeks ahead of that variety up there.

Absolutely gorgeous.

I love this corn.

A lot of people ask me whether certain varieties of corn are edible.

All corn is edible if you know how to use it, because there's different applications for different kinds of corn.

Not everything is the sweet corn that you see in the grocery store.

So, before you head to your garden center to get a run-of-the-mill variety, I encourage you to maybe try a heritage variety like we have here and explore what you can do in your garden and your kitchen and all of the different applications and uses for all of the beautiful jewels of the garden that corn is.