Corn is such a satisfying crop to grow. It looks amazing, it tastes amazing, and there are quite

literally dozens up to hundreds of different varieties of corn.

There's even different categories of corn. But first I thought we might talk a little bit about

the history of corn. So corn is one of our oldest domesticated crops. It seems like it came out of

central Mexico about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. It was domesticated from a wild grass. So corn is a grass known as Teocinte. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but Teocinte, which resembles

corn in the sense that it has similar green stalks, it has tassels up top, but the ears are tiny and there's only a couple

little seeds. But indigenous peoples experimented with these culinary qualities, they found that you could breed them and you could increase the amount of

colonels that would develop on those resulting generations of Teosinte, which basically

is how corn came to be.

So that's really where we're starting from when we're talking about growing

corn in our gardens.

Now there are quite literally tens of thousands

of different types of corn. I know I said hundreds, but there's tens of thousands of thousands of different types of corn.

I know I said hundreds, but there's tens of thousands now.

Most of them have been lost to monoculture, to industrial farming.

But there are over 28,000 unique collections of maize that are conserved within the bank of the

International Maze and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico City, which is insane.

I mean, that's just amazing.

Somewhere I really want to go someday.

But let's talk first about some of the major categories of corn and why you may want to

grow them. So first you have sweet corn. Most of us when when we grow corn in our gardens, we're growing sweet corn.

Because it's best picked early at its what we call its milk stage where it's

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