1. They're usually yellow or a cream color.
2. They grow on stalks.

In English, we often have seemingly strange words for simple things and groups of things. 'Ears of corn' are the corn cobs when they still have kernels (each piece of corn) on them. Unrelated, but worth looking into are some of the words we use for groups of animals. You might have heard of 'a flock of birds' and 'a pack of wolves', but have you heard of 'a wisdom of owls'?