Emma Cooper

Most people, if they think about pollination at all, must think of it as a binary process – it either happens or it doesn’t. But in the fruit garden life is much more complicated than that. Many of our familiar crops rely on multiple pollination events to form what we would consider to be one fruit. Raspberries are an obvious example. Apples are less obvious, but you’ll get oddly shaped apples if they are not pollinated properly (once for each seed, IIRC).

And this is what happens if your sweetcorn is not properly pollinated because the slugs eat the the sweetcorn silks (which are the female flowers).

This is by far the worst affected of the three cobs I have picked so far, but I have no hopes for a decent harvest. I should be more disappointed, but the fact is that I find it quite interesting, and the chickens are more than happy to eat the affected sweetcorn (the underside of the cob in the photo is far more normal looking).

I haven’t given it much thought before, but it looks to me as though every single thread in the silks corresponds to one of the kernels in the cob. I have never even heard of slugs/ snails munching on sweetcorn silks before, so I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought the plants where safe once they started growing strongly.

Sweetcorn is unusual because it’s one of the very few common kitchen garden crops that is pollinated by the wind rather than self-fertile or pollinated by insects. The idea of growing your sweetcorn plants in a square block, rather than in rows, is that it maximizes the chance of the pollen falling from the male flowers (tassels) at the top of the stem onto the silks on the tops of the cobs, and thereby helps to prevent patchy pollination (slugs notwithstanding). If you’ve only got a few plants then you can give them a tap when you walk past to help release the pollen.