Monday, December 12, 2011

More Corn

We worked again on taking down some of the corn maze.  Al uses his boot knife to harvest entire stalks while I go to another end of the field just to pull dried ears of dent corn.  The livestock love the cornstalks.  They are not nutritious enough to be a complete diet but the animals love them as treats, especially when they come across the ears of corn still hanging on the stalk.

I picked and shucked half a dozen big buckets of corn.  I shuck while I'm in the field.  There is a special way to twist the corn while it is still on the stalk so that it just slips right out of the shucks clean as can be. It was a sunny but very windy day.  The noise among the drying cornstalks was so loud that Al and I could not call back and forth to each other while we worked so instead we enjoyed the not-quite-peace-and-quiet.

We'd finally had a few days of rain in the past week followed by some warmer sunny days.  I found a few sprouting ears of corn on the ground that I felt were quite beautiful.  The fresh green of the sprouts was such a contrast to the drying brown of the parent plants. It made me smile.

3 comments:

  1. when I was a kid we used to play hide and seek in corn fields and wheat fields. It was so much fun! Although I don't think the farmers appreciated our antics.

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  2. I imagine that is why a corn maze if such a popular thing these days! My son is married to the most precious young lady who was raised on this berry farm. This year they had their 1st corn maze. My husband, an engineer, designed it & got a buddy who is a surveyor to go out, use GPS & mark it with him. It turned out to be a great success. So as we are going through cutting this corn we have reflected on how much delight it brought all those visiting families & now it is just thrilling our creatures here. Including, of course, the team of enormous oxen that our son left behind when he went off to college - nice to know he's contributing to their upkeep in this fashion.

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  3. Deb--I had a few ears of ornamental corn as a decoration this Fall, and when I was done using it, I put it outside in the ivy for a few days. Boy, were those ears stripped clean of kernels when I next looked!! (Makes me wonder what kinds of 'sharp toothed' creatures live that close to my house!!) :)

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