The lacy-leafed tomato vine is the poster plant of hobby gardening—it thrives just as happily in a coffee can wired to the slats of a fire escape as it does in a loamy country plot, and its rewards, both vegetable and spiritual, are bounteous. Nothing says summer quite like biting into a juicy, sweet tomato from your own garden, freshly picked, maybe sprinkled with a little bit of salt. I adore tomatoes, and every year I go wild with my own tomato gardening. But let me offer for your consideration an endeavor arguably more exquisite, and definitely more ridiculous, and absolutely fun as hell: you should grow some corn.

For me, it began at the garden store, nearly five years ago, when I moved into an apartment with a terrace off the living room, which I resolved to fill with plants. At the store, next to twisting seedlings of Big Boys and Green Zebras and other tomato varieties, were a few small containers sprouting what looked like single blades of lawn grass. These were corn shoots—which, it turns out, are technically a grass, but a grass that is inclined, in the course of sixty to seventy-five well-watered days, to shoot up to the height of your average N.B.A. point guard. I bought a flat of seedlings, opened up enough “how to grow corn” tabs to crash my Web browser, and, in the course of a hot, sticky New York City summer, I fell in love.