WANATAH, Ind. – An Indiana man was stunned to find multiple ears of sweet corn where just one ear should be on several of the plants in his garden.

The most ears growing in a single bunch was five.

“I asked myself what in the heck is going on. I’ve never seen this before,” said James Irwin, who has grown sweet corn annually for over a half century in the garden of his Wanatah-area residence.

Even more unusual, perhaps, he discovered several other bouquets containing mostly three ears in his one quarter of an acre sweet corn crop.

The discovery is rare but not totally uncommon, said Dan Quinn, assistant professor of agronomy at Purdue University, and a Purdue Extension corn specialist.

Quinn said the chances of bouquet ears developing in a field or garden are better than winning a lottery but still kind of a one in a million happening.

“It’s a very unique response in the plant,” he said.

Quinn said the cause of multiple ears sprouting from the exact same spot on the stalk is not 100 percent known but it’s often believed to be linked to a change in the plant’s hormonal balance early in the growing season.

He said hormonal changes can happen when the plant is stressed from things like weather extremes or injury.

Normally, multiple ears in the very early stages of growth emerge from each node in the stalk but just one dominant ear in each node survives and reaches maturity.

A hormonal shift will eliminate or reduce that dominance, though, allowing other ears in a node to keep growing, he said.

Quinn said a shift in the hormones can even cause ears to grow from the tassels.

“These hormonal changes can cause really odd things to happen in that plant,” he said.

Someone might think bouquet ears mean a higher yield, but the opposite is true. Quinn said what would have been the dominant ear has to compete with the other ears for the same amount of nutrients in a plant.

As a result, Quinn said the ears don’t reach their growth potential and have fewer, smaller sized kernels.

“Having a bouquet of five to eight ears probably in terms of yield is actually worse than having one good primary ear,” he said.

Quinn said another potential cause rests within the genetics of a plant.

“There’s instances where certain hybrids are more prone than others. It’s often very random. It’s something that can be difficult to explain,” he said.

Irwin, 85, who raises a variety of other produce in the rest of his garden, said he ventured into his corn to see how the plants were coming along when he first discovered the quintuplet ears.

He spotted the other ear bouquets while checking the rest of his corn plants.

“There was several of them in there,” he said.

He later went to the Purdue Extension office outside LaPorte with two of his bouquets to learn about the cause.

Irwin said he took pictures of his bouquet ears and plans to keep them for as long as possible as a conversation piece.

“It sure was a surprise to me when I was looking at them,” he said.

Quinn, who serves the entire state with his expertise on corn, said bouquet ears can also develop in feed corn.

Typically, Quinn said just a few bouquet ears are reported annually in the state, which has more than 5 million acres of corn.

“We’ll catch one here and there. It’s rare. It’s very rare,” he said.