We’ve got another milestone at Terra Firma Farm this week: our earliest ever harvest of Sweet Corn, on June 1st. That’s a full week earlier than our previous record, set just last year.
It’s always our goal to have sweet corn to harvest in early June. But that means planting in early March, which is often impossible. Corn is planted “from seed”, meaning the seeds are planted directly into the soil. We can’t plant if it’s raining, which it often is. And the soil has to dry out enough to drive a tractor on it.
But even if the ground dries out enough to plant the seed in ground, it’s not necessarily a good idea. Corn needs the soil to be warm, and heavy rain after planting causes it to rot before sprouting. If there is rain in the 7-day forecast, I don’t plant it as it takes at least 5 days to emerge even under ideal conditions. Most years, we only get one window of conditions like these to plant corn in March. Other years, we don’t even get one.
Even if the corn sprouts nicely, the weather conditions afterwards can greatly affect its growth and thus the timing of the first harvest. An extended period of cold conditions will stunt it, especially if there is frost. And while it doesn’t mind rain once it is up and out of the ground, it doesn’t like being flooded. We have had years where corn planted the first of April catches up to our March corn, but ends up producing better because growing conditions were better for it when it was young.
Last year, I found a new variety of sweet corn that promised more tolerance for cold soils and faster growth. It turned out to be a winner, which is a big reason why we were able to harvest so early last year. It’s also pretty tasty, although the ears are slightly smaller than our main season varieties and the flavor maybe slightly less delicious.
But the single biggest reason for our earliest ever corn is, as you might imagine, the weather. We planted the first corn on March 3rd in nearly perfect conditions. It popped out of the ground in just 5 days, and with no rain in the forecast, we decided to plant more on March 10th. The weather was absurdly warm the entire month, with some days over 90 degrees, and entirely dry for the first time in my career as a farmer. We ended up with 3 plantings of March corn plus another on April 1st. They grew quickly in the unseasonably hot conditions.
Normally when we harvest corn, you can’t even see the people picking in the ocean of tall, lush plants. But the plants in our March corn fields are sometimes comically short, not even chest high. And the ears can be quite small. Not this year, though. The field looks like it normally would in July, and the ears are big, juicy, and abundant.
The corn season will be flipped on its head a bit though. Our normal March weather arrived just after April Fool’s Day with a series of cold, wet storms that rotted the seeds of one April corn planting, and kept us out of the field for over a week. So right around July 4th we will have a gap in harvest — and so will most other farms in California. The rains in April hit an extensive area including most of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys; we actually got much less rain than many other areas did.
Sweet corn is a highly perishable crop. If harvest is delayed, it becomes tough and inedible. And it can’t be held in cold storage for more than four or five days before it starts to lose moisture and shrivel. So there is a good likelihood that the quintessential Fourth of July vegetable may be pretty hard to find on 7/4/26. Until then, you’ll likely see it in your boxes every week.