Every year I have a few "toys" I play with in the garden. This year it was aspabroc (generic broccolini) grown for a friend, Small Sugar Pumpkin, Thai Red Roselle and Japanese White Hulless Popcorn. The first three grew pretty good but the popcorn lagged.
I grew it in a 4 x 18' bed, something I've done successfully with corn before. The problem came when it didn't all germinate at once. There were a lot of skips and by the time I reseeded them and they finally came up, I had a feeling there was gong to be a pollination problem at the other end of the line.
But the stalks eventually grew up and I was amazed at seeing up to five ears per stalk with pretty red silks!
Eventually about two thirds of the tassels were starting to release pollen and the others weren't ready yet. Houston, we have a problem. Later when the stalks and ears had dried down I pulled a few sample ears. With the shucks still on it felt like there was hardly anything in there but they are just small, about 5" or so long and maybe 1" wide. And it was evident there was a pollination problem.
I had about given up on it and put it all aside until last week when I went through the bed to pull whatever ears there were. The bugs had gotten to a lot and a few had remains of smut but I got about fifteen ears that were mostly filled out. Good enough for a test popping. I shelled off the good kernels, got about 2 cups of kernels and last night we gave it a test pop.
Well, whaddaya know... GOOD STUFF!
It was really tender with good flavor and, as advertised, no hulls to dig out of your teeth! I'm definitely going to do this again next spring and this time I will overseed so there are no skips to interfere with good pollination. And I will probably pick the ears off earlier and dry them down in the shed away from the bugs. It turned out to be a good experiment after all!