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A Corn Year May 17, 2011
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A Corn Year
May 17, 2011

Greetings Friends of the Farm,

A little salt, a little butter....crunch, crunch, crunch. Sigh with pleasure....

Real corn...fresh, crunchy, juicy, sweet...is hard to get. But when it happens, when it’s a “corn year,” it brings out the raccoon, crow, deer, wild hogs, opossum, squirrel, and worm in me. And everyone else I know.

We eat it raw in the field, standing in the hot sun, plucking a test ear off the plant, pulling the leaves down, flicking the worm off to the soil (squashing it if there’s no chickens about), gnawing the kernels right off the cob, to the last one. Ohhhh man, good.

And that’s before the corn ever meets butter, salt, and heat. Grill the corn, still in its jacket of coarse leaves, over coals, until the leaves are toasty. After removing the leaves, add butter, lime juice, salt as you wish to the corn.

Or, roll undressed corn in a skillet coated with butter and salt, until the corn has a slight tan here and there.

Yum. A supper with corn on the cob and a salad is just fine. You can really understand why all the critters are after it, for it’s hard to put an ear down when you’ve started on it! That’s why it’s best eaten in the privacy of your own dining room. Follow it with a tooth pick. Total enjoyment.

We don’t boil corn, obviously, since we love it raw. Boiling water can make the corn soggy, and with very fresh corn, soggy is almost an abomination.

This is a corn year, and so one to savor. We usually gamble on growing sweet corn every year, either here in Austin or at our farm in Gause, Milam County. The results run the gamut of from none to bountiful. After all, this is not the “corn belt”... we’re in Texas. The results depend on:

The weather. Corn plants do not like cold soil (poor germination), or floods of torrential rains and high winds. Advanced crops of tall stalks will be flattened to the ground. Sometimes the crop can rise up and make it, but if it’s a typical Texas flood, the chances are slim. When that happens, the next reason surely follows:

Wild animals. Raccoons climb corn stalks and ride them to the ground. Then they consume the corn. Perhaps only a bite out of this ear and that one, but enough to ruin the crop. (Who wants to eat after a raccoon?) Opossums, ditto. Squirrels, well, they aren’t heavy enough to take the corn to the ground so they just sample it in its vertical splendor. And wild hogs? Well, it’s over.
Crows. They are the cruelest pests. The seeds, the kernels, are planted in the soil. They germinate.  As the root drives down into the soil, the stem shoots up into the air. Bad mistake, unfortunately, as the crow kingdom is up in the trees surrounding the field. They’ve been watching the farmer plant the seeds. They know, they know, that in a few days, they will reap the reward of his labor. When the shoot of green is just a couple of inches high, and after the farmer has left the field, they swoop in for the feast. Pull up the shoot, and voila, there is the kernel still attached. The prize is consumed, one kernel after another, until the flock of crows has had its fill.

Sadly, in Texas, later, make-up plantings of corn are considered folly. The reason? Worms.

Texas corn, organically grown, usually bears at least one worm in each ear. Even if it is harvested in May or early June. The worm will be at the tip of the ear, and doesn’t take more than a modest share of the kernels, as those kernels, at the tip will not be the ones you and I savor, for they are small.

But plantings of corn that mature later than June will have communities of worms in each ear. You wouldn’t want that corn. Trust me.

Of course, the resident chickens, big fans of corn and worms together, wish that we would be crazy and try to plant “fall corn” or even July corn.
Alas they will just have to be content with the after-offerings at our farm stand. We prep the corn for customers, examining the tips, and if a worm is present, we clip it off, along with its meal, into a waiting harvest tub. At the end of market, the tub is emptied out in the Hen House to the absolute glee of the hens.

This year is a corn year, so come get it. You don’t have to have the water boiling.

Carol Ann

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