First 2016 Virginia-grown sweet corn to be sold during the holiday weekend

It’s officially summer, and sweet corn season is just getting started – in the Virginia Beach area.

Cullipher Farm in Virginia Beach has harvested its first sweet corn of the year to sell at the farm’s stand in Pungo. Kim Cullipher said her family has 35 acres planted in sweet corn this year.

“We usually alternate bicolor with white sweet corn, and right now the bicolor is available. It’s usually the first to come in,” she was quoted as saying in a press release from the VIrginia Farm Bureau Federation.

This year is the first time the farm has sheltered 3 acres of sweet corn under plastic row covers so it would mature sooner. The technique “helps to promote growth earlier,” explained Cullipher’s brother, Mike Cullipher.

Kim Culliper said. “By July 4, people will be able to buy it by the bag containing 60 ears. Our customers eat it on the cob or make succotash. Others cut it off the cob to freeze and use in soups and chowders during the winter.”

At the Chesapeake Farmers’ Market, local sweet corn isn’t available yet. It normally comes in by July 4, but a cold, rainy spring has delayed some crops, according to the VFBF.

“The spring weather was so wet, it was hard to get things planted. … It may be the middle of July before we have an abundant supply,”  Watson Lawrence, a Virginia Cooperative Extension agriculture agent in Chesapeake, was quoted as saying.

Once the season does get into full swing, Lawrence said, about six vendors will have different varieties of local sweet corn at the Chesapeake market.

According to VFBF, sweet corn is in season across Virginia during July and August. Most of the corn grown in Virginia is feed corn, which is consumed by livestock, but there are farmers growing sweet corn throughout the state.