GardenSweet Corn variety
Butter and Sugar Sweet Corn
✓ In your garden
Butter and Sugar is a bicolor sweet corn (standard (su)), ready in about 73 days. It’s a standard (su) type — old-fashioned corn flavor that turns starchy fast, so eat it the day you pick it. Plant sweet corn in a block of several short rows, not one long one, so the wind pollinates it and every ear fills out. It’s ripe about three weeks after the silks show, when a poked kernel squirts milky.
“Sweet corn for the home garden — pick it and eat it fast.”
Growing basics — shared by every sweet corn
Butter and Sugar grows like any other sweet corn. The full picture — how deep to plant, spacing, feeding, pests, harvest — lives on the Sweet Corn page so it's maintained in one place.
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Spacing (in row)
- 8–12 in
- Row spacing
- 30–36 in
- Planting depth
- 1–2 in
- Soil pH
- 6–6.5
- Water
- Moderate
What is Butter and Sugar good for?
- Boiled & grilledStraight off the cob. Great
- Freezing & canningCut the kernels for the freezer. Great
- Eating days laterSugar fades fast — eat it soon. Skip it
From how it grows — kitchens vary.
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Want the full 10/50/90% odds + nearest stations? Open the frost tool →When to plant Butter and Sugar in your zone
Zone 6bGreenhouse or cover on: your start slides ~4 weeks earlier and your harvest stretches ~3 weeks later (shown striped).
Planting seeds straight in the ground only works where the season's long and warm — most gardeners start seeds indoors or buy young plants, or you'd pick your first tomato right as frost hits.
Comfortable — first ripe fruit lands around late Jun, well before your typical frost (~late Oct).
- Plant seeds outside
- mid Apr – early May
- Growing
- early May – late Jun
- Picking
- late Jun – mid Jul
Typical dates for zone 6b — set your zone or ZIP above for yours.
What to plant near Butter and Sugar — and what to keep away
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TomatoPractical
Corn earworm and tomato fruitworm are the same moth. Side by side, you're setting its table twice.
The badge is the honesty. Trialed = a published field trial · Practical = a real mechanism · Traditional = companion-chart lore. These pairings hold for every sweet corn.
Pairings compiled from West Virginia University Extension.
Growing Butter and Sugar — the things that trip people up
- Plant sweet corn in a block of at least four short rows rather than one long row — it’s wind-pollinated, and a block sets full, even ears while a single row leaves gappy cobs.
- Keep different sugar types apart (a couple hundred feet, or staggered planting), or cross-pollination between them makes the kernels tough and starchy.
Butter and Sugar sweet corn at a glance
| Type | Su Normal |
|---|---|
| Days to ripe | 73 days after you plant it outside |
| Color | Bicolor |
Extra fields from seed-catalog listings and university growing guides. Days to ripe and disease resistance shift with your climate and seed source — double-check with your local extension office before you buy.
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Common questions about Butter and Sugar
How long does Butter and Sugar take to grow?
About 73 days, ripe roughly three weeks after the silks appear.
Why plant Butter and Sugar in a block?
Corn is pollinated by wind carrying pollen from the tassels down to the silks. A block of short rows pollinates far better than one long row, so the ears fill out completely.
Browse more sweet corn varieties →