Last edited on November 02, 2026. View history
Black Navajo Corn
A variety of corn
How to sow black Navajo corn: Direct seed outdoors
Sun requirement for black Navajo corn: Plant in Full Sun
A dry corn with small black cobs and a sweet, chewy, nutty flavour, best picked before the kernels go fully black. It is used as a flour corn, for posole and for tortillas, and takes longer to cook than modern sweetcorn. Sow in trays and transplant at about 3.5 cm high into 15 to 16 °C soil, 30 cm apart in rows 50 cm apart.
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Black navajo corn facts
Lifespan
Crop cycle
Max altitude
Optimal light
What are growing degree days?
A plant grows with warmth, not with days. A growing degree day is one day's worth of useful warmth: how many degrees the day's average temperature is above the lowest temperature the crop grows at. Add them up from planting and you know how far along the crop is, whatever the calendar says.
Say that lowest temperature is 10°C. A day averaging 17°C gives 7 growing degree days. A day averaging 8°C gives none, as it is too cold for the crop to grow. That is why the same lettuce takes about 50 days in a summer and 90 in an autumn: it needs the same total warmth either way.
For black Navajo corn, the FAO EcoCrop database gives a lowest growing temperature of 10°C and a shortest growing cycle of 65 days at its best temperature, about 1008 growing degree days to a first harvest.
Where you've told us where your garden is, we use this and the weather there to predict when your black Navajo corn will be ready to harvest. We don't use it for how long a plant lives or when it finishes: we go by what members have logged for that.
Growing black Navajo corn
- Dig compost into the bed 1 week before sowing
- Water regularly at sowing every week
- Thin the seedlings 2 weeks after sowing
- Weed between the plants 3 weeks after sowing every 2 weeks
- Mulch and hill soil round the stems 4 weeks after sowing
- Feed with a nitrogen fertiliser 5 weeks after sowing
- Pick the cobs at first harvest
- Pull out the stalks 2 weeks after first harvest
Plant black Navajo corn with
marjoram
rice bean
spaghetti squash
wine cap mushroom
Video
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Ecological requirements
Data from the FAO EcoCrop database for Zea mays L.
| Family / Taxonomy | Liliopsida Commelinidae Cyperales Gramineae |
|---|---|
| Optimal soil depth | medium (50-150 cm) |
| Optimal soil fertility | high |
| Optimal soil salinity | low (<4 dS/m) |
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