Poorly sweetcorn!

I think my sweetcorn have been attacked by frit fly! My plants are stunted, even though they have hairstyles and are producing very little cobs. When they were babies their leaves went all shredded - I thought it was pigeons, but in retrospect a pigeon would have bitten the leaves clean off, not just shred them. And when I watered them (the plants, not the pigeons, obviously) swarms of very little 'midge-like' flies wafted up from them.

That'll teach me to buy plants instead of growing them myself won't it!?

I was wondering if anyone else had the same grief. Muddifoot was talking about 'lazy corn', so maybe I'm not alone.

The next question is can anything be done? Can they be 'cured' or have I lost my crop?  :cry:

Quote from: "Jo"

That'll teach me to buy plants instead of growing them myself won't it!?

Why?

Bought in plants can just as easily be attacked, in fact you can import pests with them. If you raise them from seed you can keep a close eye on them from square one - that's the lesson!

I think that was what she was saying, she believes that should have sowed seed rather than buying. At least that was the way I read it  

Shredding along the length of the leaves may be caused by small slugs or snails; they killed off a couple of mine like that while they were small and I still have 2 plants smaller than the others as a result of slug damage that happened a couple of months ago.  Once the plants get bigger they seem to shrug these attacks off, provided it doesn't happen to all the leaves.  I still put plenty of slug pellets down though to be on the safe side.  Could they need feeding with something like blood, fish and bone to give them a boost?  Someone more experienced than me might be able to answer that question.