There are few more intoxicating smells than toasting corn. It wafts into your path in Mexico at any time of day when food is being prepared or eaten, which is to say, most of the time. Over the years, I’ve tried to recreate that smell in my own kitchen in England by making tortillas with masa (or maize) flour. It’s never quite the same because reconstituting tortilla dough from dried maize flour is several steps of freshness away from using masa that has just been ground from nixtamalized corn. Nixtamal is what you get when you cook then soak dried corn with an alkali solution; this process breaks down the outer coating, enriches the nutrients, and makes the kernels easier to grind and the resulting ground dough better at sticking together. I can’t promise that I’m going to get round to making my own nixtamal any time soon, but I’m taking the first step by growing my own corn, a black corn variety from the heart of Mexico. A friend gifted me an ear of this black beauty when she visited last summer:

Given the persistence of gloomy, wet days in England’s springtime this year, it may be a bit early to start sowing crops that respond best to sun and warmth. But at the tail end of a long break from work over Easter, we couldn’t contain ourselves and got going. I was surprised both by how easily the kernels came off the dried ear and by their marbled beauty, modelled here in my glamourous assistant’s hand. The five-kernel sowing method worked well for us last year, when we grew a substantial amount of sweetcorn. In a medium sized pot filled with compost, put a kernel in the centre and four kernels in a square pattern around it, then push down to a depth of about 4-5cm and cover. By the time the plants grow to about 10 to 15cm tall, in about 6 weeks all being well, you can plant them out without having to worry about a late frost (a curse on UK weather!) damaging their chances. It’s also a good idea to sow batches a couple of weeks apart so that you can harvest and use the corn more gradually over late summer and early autumn, rather than being inundated with everything at once! My glamourous assistant gets a bit over eager in the sowing process and has to be gently restrained from planting enough seeds to fill a small-holding. For example, despite having learned from experience that 3 or 4 courgette plants produces more than enough courgettes (and courgette blossoms and marrows) for a 2-person household, we’re in for an experience this year…

Me: I think a maximum of 4 courgette plants this year
Glamourous Assistant: But we have 2 types of courgette seeds
Me: Okay, sow 4 of each type then. Heaven help us!
GA: But there’s only 8 seeds in each packet. I’ll put them all in.
Me: Honey, no…

Scenes from Chez Tonehouse

Back to our corn plans! Sweetcorn isn’t so suitable for the nixtamalization treatment because you need a more savoury flavour for making tortillas and other Mexican staples, but we’re growing them again this year too. They make excellent barbeque fare! In 2023, we had about 90 sweetcorn plants, which took up a sizeable slice of the allotment, but we made the most of the space by planting black beans and squashes in and around the corn grids. This is known variously as the three sisters or milpa system, as these three types of crops – corn, beans and squash – have been grown together for thousands of years in different regions of the Americas. It works because the beans put into the soil what the corn is taking out, while the sprawling squash plants provide ground cover retaining moisture in the soil during hot, dry spells.