How can you tell when corn is ripe and ready to be picked?
Answers:
OMG there are so many people looking this stuff up to get this answer.
DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM!
I grew up on a farm, I know a lot of useless crap, waiting on jeopardy for the call back.
To Eat:
When the silks, or the long silky hairy things (great technical name huh?) turn brown and begin to dry out. Corn is not gonna be a crop that will mature all at once. All the seeds are gonna germinate at different times, ya know the plants all did not pop out of the earth at the same time either, so goes to show ya that farming is NOT a science.
To Use For Feed or cornmeal:
After the silks turn brown wait for the stalks to dry up and begin to lean to one side. Harvest and grind it up and feed to your animals, or make fresh ground meal to make cornbread. Wanna warn ya tho, this kind of meal is very hard and really shouldnt be used for people consumption unless you like picking hard pieces of corn kernels out ya teeth(like eating popcorn) or spitting out the hard parts not refreshed in the baking process.
It'll pop!
When the cob is roughly 20cm long and when you pierce one of the kernels, milky stuff comes out!
when its fiber( look like brown hair, located top of the corn) turns dry or fall
Look at the colour of the cob (it should be yellow) and check the structure as well. The corn is ripe when the cobs are fully developed and the corn itself can easily be separated.
Corn is ready for harvest about 20 days after the first silks appear. Pick corn that is to be stored for a day or two in the cool temperatures of early morning to prevent the ears from building up an excess of field heat, which causes a more rapid conversion of sugars to starch.
I hope that you are not looking at a field of maize that you think is sweetcorn! They are different. The maize grown in England is for cattle feed only. Don't try to eat it, it's disgusting!
I know, we made that mistake, too!
Have you seen some in a field somewhere? I wouldn't bother picking it if I were you because you'll probably find that it's maize, which is useless for us and tough as old boots. It's usually grown so that it can be turned into animal feed.
ready mid summer to late autumn depending on region.kernel's are ripe when pale yellow, over ripe when dark yellow. When the silk turns from red to dark brown test kernels by pulling back sheath and pressing kernel, if watery, unripe if milky, ripe, if doughy, over ripe
when the fibres at the tip dry up and turn black
the color of their skin is already yellow
The answers post by the user, for information only, UKQnA.com does not guarantee the right.