Knee by the by the fourth

by the 4th of July.

If you know where that comes from, you know the plant that we're talking about today is corn.

Corn is weird because it is a plant that's relatively cheap at the

grocery store. Now the reason it's cheap is an entirely different story that

connects to actually quite a few problems with our food system, but needless to say, many of us in the garden do not grow it because it's a little complex, right? There's just a lot to it it even though it's pretty much just a grain it's not

something that is that hard to grow once you understand how it grows I really kind of

got into it last summer as well as on a tour I did where I just

saw field after field of corn and I was eating sweet corn straight out of the field

and honestly it was absolutely one of the joys of my gardening life. Now corn how does it

actually grow it grows on a bamboo like stock that can reach over six feet

tall the leaves are long they're oblong, they come directly from the

stock, and the plants are what's known as monoecious, which means that each plant has both

the male and the female organs, but they're on separate flowers.

Now that's going to become very important later on in the episode.

At the very top of the stock you have something called the tassel.

They're spiky golden flowers, they hold the pollen where it can easily be carried away by the wind.

Below at the end of each ear of corn is the female flower which is what's known as the silk. These thin fibers will carry

grains of pollen down to the seeds on the cob which then develop. So when you bite

into an ear of corn, you're actually eating a bunch of fresh seeds of the plant.

That's actually really cool when you think about it that way. When it comes to corn, is it a vegetable or is it a fruit?

From a culinary perspective, corn has all the attributes of a vegetable,

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