More Sweetcorn Woes

I've had more problems with sweetcorn, but also found out some useful information about mixing varities.

Sweetcorn Problems
I sowed sweetcorn 5 times, but the mice ate the first two batches of seeds. I covered the next 3 sowings to protect them from mice, but the weather was cold and wet for several weeks, so germination was poor.

3 weeks ago I had 8 sweetcorn in the greenhouse. Then we had a bit of a heatwave and some were scorched. And then we went back to the cold wet weather again.

We were in B&Q 2 weeks ago and found a pack of sweetcorn, 4-5" high, looking really healthy - there were actually 16 in the pack. At £1.98 for the pack, it just seemed like the only way I was going to get any decent sweetcorn this year, so I got them.

As the weather turned cold and wet, I left them on the kitchen windowsill. 7 of them started wilting. I'm not sure what the cause is, but guessing the cold weather is part of it - the kitchen windowsill probably gets very cold.

I put them in the airing cupboard for a couple of days in the hope that they'd recover in the warmth, but no luck, they died. I've now left the pack outside on the garden table.

I now have:
2 Sweet Bounty (from T&M)
6 Swift (from T&M)
9 Extra Sweet (from Verve / B&Q)

Mixing Varieties
I've always known we shouldn't mix varieties of sweetcorn, but as I've never had problems before, I hadn't looked into it further. Essentially, some varities need to be separated from the pollens of other varieties. I'm not entirely sure what happens if they're not separated - it could be that they don't pollinate properly, or they could pollinate and taste bad.

It turns out that there are different "types" of sweetcorn: Standard, Supersweet, Sugary Extender and Synergistic. Each named variety is of one of these 4 types. Mixing types is not good, but we might be able to mix varieties within each type.

Sweet Bounty and Swift are both supersweet types. I couldn't find any information about the Extra Sweet ones. As other varities with similar "extra sweet" names are supersweet types, I've decided to take a chance and plant them all together.

There are ways to grow the types together and isolate them from the pollen of other sweetcorn by wrapping the cobs in bags or plastic bottles, but I'm not going to mess about!