Golden Valley Farm
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BitterSweet Corn

14/6/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Doesn't it look magnificent? Roughly 3,000 corn plants reaching for the sky, flowers ablaze in the sun, dripping pollen onto the waiting silks below, each pollinated silk connected to a single nub on the ear, starting its journey from nothing to a ripe yellow kernel, thousands of silks and kernels at a time.... 

At least, that's what happened last year, resulting in a beautiful (and relatively profitable) harvest of corn from mid-March to late April. This year, due to the Dread Dark Sword Grass (5/12/2013), my entire first plantings were swallowed by voracious cutworms, and the corn you see above was a speculative set of second plantings, started in succession from late November. Late being the operative word.

She grew, the corn, unbothered by the (now-sated?) grubs, and grew well. By March I was wandering thoughtfully down the rows that rose above my head, enjoying the whisper and swish of a burgeoning corn-field, and was daring to hope for a warm autumn, an early ripening, a discovery that what they said about corn in Tassie was wrong....maybe the microclimate of Golden Valley was sunnier and warmer than I thought?

And in mid-April there it was: ripe ears on the first planting. Succulent, sweet and plentiful -- sure, it was late, and the corn was not ripening in a block the way it did last year, when you could just walk down the rows and break off each ear. I had to feel each ear for firmness, and for that rounded end that signified fully ripened kernels, and often I had to rip off the husk a little to check for colour and plumpness....but that's ok, I'm still getting corn.

To weeks later the full, grim picture became clearer:
Picture
This is an ear from the second surviving planting. As you can see, maybe one tenth or less of the kernels are ripened; the rest are small and/or shrunken, even though the ear is a good size, and the silks are browned off. The third and fourth plantings didn't even get to size, and are only good for corn-silk tea. So that's the end of the corn for this year.

I could moan about all that effort, the time taken and the ground covered with these plantings, but it was always speculative to plant that late. On the upside,  I still ate a lot of delicious corn over several weeks, and now I know when NOT to plant corn in future.

So I'm now thinking of the corn crop as a big green manure for my pea plantings, which will begin in a month or so. If anyone asks, that's what I'll tell them, anyway!
1 Comment
Fiona
18/6/2014 02:18:33 pm

Sorry Alex, just found this entry. How many corn do you plant in total? Just curious. I have found my second plants like that too, though we still manage to get the odd fully mature cob. The picture of all your corn is certainly a sight but I admit that no sooner was I in awe that my thoughts immediately turned to all the work involved. I tip my hat!

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