Corn Time

Yesterday was garden corn time on the farm.  It's a day I look forward to and dread at the same time.  Sort of like childbirth--hard work and misery but the results are worth the effort.  The problem with corn is that you have it for one day.  Every ear is ready at once and must be picked, shucked, silked, blanched, chilled, scraped from the cob and frozen for the coming winter.  Each year we make great plans to stagger the planting so we'll have a little now and later through the summer.  Somehow it never happens.  One year we planted two plantings, two weeks apart.  I swear every ear was ready on the same day.  This year we were aiming for a month apart, but it rained so much we never got it done. So, as usual, my whole corn crop was ready on one day.

Our garden has been pitiful this year.  The countryside is lush and green instead of the brown and dry of a typical August, but my garden is sad.  Two rows of beans just flat drowned the week we had five inches of rain.  The tomatoes got a blight and the eggplant never made anything bigger than a nubbin.  The only thing that has thrived is the cucumbers and they have been prodigious, producing in numbers and sizes that are staggering.  The corn has done well, we just don't have much of it.  The good news is that picking at 80 degrees is a lot more fun than picking at 100 degrees, which is what we usually have.

I drug the grandsons out of the house with promises of ice cream later and we trooped to the garden.  Armed with feed sacks we attacked the corn rows.  In a short time we had filled our sacks and were sitting under the old Maple tree in the cool shade.  Everyone grabbed a chair and we piled the corn in the middle and began pulling the shucks off.   This is my favorite time.  The quiet, repetitious movements leave lots of time and brain power for "yarns".  The boys chatted about this and that before asking, "Did daddy have to do this too?"  My mind flew back to the early years on the farm when growing a garden meant cheap food through the winter with hungry kids to feed.  The garden was bigger then and I did a lot more canning and freezing than I do now.

"Yes," I replied, "They helped with everything, whether they wanted to or not!  I particularly remember one summer when Papa had had a surplus of fertilizer from another project and decided to apply it to the garden.  It  was  move that should have killed the whole garden but the garden gods were kind (or cruel, however you want to look at it) and instead everything just took off and grew like crazy.  It was one of the years we had planted a lot of corn and, of course, it all came in on one day.  That summer one of my son's friends had become a second son and just about moved in with us.  Spying the three kids going to the barn I quickly corralled them and issued orders to help with the picking.  Gathering up their feed sacks they marched reluctantly into the rows of corn forming tunnels of verdant green."

"All through the hot morning we picked corn, filling our sacks and dumping them under the old Maple tree, about where we sit right now.  The pile of corn grew and grew and still we were finding ears to pull.  Finally, the last ear was found and we gathered around to begin shucking the corn.  The kids stared at  the pile in awe.  They literally had picked a mountain of corn, piled up in a heap taller than the tallest kid.  We were all a little taken back by the sheer size of our task, but with only a little grousing they began to shuck.  Much later,when they finally had finished the corn and reduced the mountain to stacks of yellow goodness, they trooped off to hide in the barn while I proceeded to finish the job of blanching, chilling, scraping and freezing.  On that day I froze 75 pints of corn--my all time record for one day. "

"The little friend announced at supper that night that he thought he would go home for a while.  At least until after frost."

Now grown with children, still wants to know if the corn is ready before he will come visit.