The phrase "a stalk of corn" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a single stem or shoot of corn, often in agricultural or culinary contexts.
Example: "The farmer harvested a stalk of corn from the field to demonstrate its growth."
Alternatives: "a ear of corn" or "a cob of corn."
Iowa farmers used to call a stalk of corn growing in a soybean field a "volunteer".
The New Yorker, August 13 , 1960 P. 25Incidental Intelligence (Agronomy Division): At the base of a plane tree in front of the Wurlitzer Building, on West Forty-second Street, last week a stalk of corn was sprouting.
The bursts of orange in the night are staggeringly beautiful, and at one point Malick notices and chooses to dwell on a locust on a stalk of corn with the contrast of fire and night making the image.
Incidental Intelligence (Agronomy Division): At the base of a plane tree in front of the Wurlitzer Building, on West Forty-second Street, last week a stalk of corn was sprouting.
By M. Silverman and John McCarten The New Yorker, August 13 , 1960 P. 25Incidental Intelligence (Agronomy Division): At the base of a plane tree in front of the Wurlitzer Building, on West Forty-second Street, last week a stalk of corn was sprouting.
Here, for instance, is Description No. 475, exacting and chilling as a steel instrument: "She was a stalk of ripe corn, but bound not as cereals are but as a rare first edition, with all the binder's art.
On NPR's "Fresh Air," Maureen Corrigan compared the story to "a stalk of late-summer corn that's blighted at its very tip... four-fifths ripe, golden deliciousness, one-fifth barren cob".
Suddenly, just at the end of the grass strip, he spotted a lone stalk of corn--not of elephant's-eye height and nothing to set one's salivary glands in motion, but nevertheless a God-given stalk of corn.
And entries in an array of agriculture and horticulture competitions — which included categories like tallest stalk of corn, largest zinnia and heaviest pumpkin in the 200-pound-plus range — were down.
"In the time I am writing," Hooker later reported, "every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in their ranks a few moments before".
