Rainbow sweetcorn not so sweet

Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots reports on his experiment this year growing Painted Hills sweetcorn. to summarise, the plants weren’t very robust, the yield was poor, and the kernels weren’t all that sweet. (Perhaps he should try Red Miracle next year.) On the plus side:

Wow! Multi-colored sweet corn! Can you believe it? A variation of the famous Painted Mountain corn! Perfectly edible. Truly a visual delight, if not a tasty one.

Pat admits that it needs more work to thrive under his conditions, and that he’s not about to take that on, which is fair enough. Maybe someone else will rise to the challenge.

Inorganic farming

In the NYT article I just blogged about, there is a toxic aside:

The strength of the disease has shocked hardened farmers: topical copper sprays, a convenient organic preventive, have been much less effective than in past years.

Convenient organic preventive?

Organic farming has a few dirty secrets. This is one of the worst. For some reason, it is ok to spray inorganic copper, a toxic heavy metal, on organic crops. A farmer who cares about the environment, health, or whatever good thing organic farming stands for should not use it. Buyers of organic tomatoes in the northwest of the USA are being duped.