This was a task I truely enjoyed today. I've tried for so many years to grow sweet corn here in our garden, and never succeeded. I could get it to grow, and the night before I was to harvest it, it'd get raided by raccoons. I'd actually see them by the edge of the garden, checking on the ripeness of the corn. They'd prowl around, and no matter what I did, they'd get it before me.
I sprinkled it with chili pepper, and they just seemed to enjoy the taste even more. Scarecrows, fake owls, cd's hung to swing in the rain, even a motion sensor sprinkler wouldn't chase them off. Always, the night before the corn got ready to pick, they'd beat me to it and I'd come out in the morning to see corn stalks leaning in all directions, and corn ripped down and torn apart.
What wasn't eaten was just spoiled and destroyed. It's been a battle for about 25 years here. You'd think I'd just get smart enough to give up, but I kept trying. This year a friend told me about their secret to success. They bought a small electric fence kit and strung a temporary fence around their corn patch. This year we did it, just two strands, one six inches and the other about a foot off the ground and we finally were able to harvest our own corn this year.
The ears are small, with our strange gardening year, but delicious, and of course, they almost all got ripe at once, so today we picked it and just simply nuked 5 ears at a time in the shucks, let them cool, stripped the shucks off and cut it off the cob to freeze in one big bag. We'll open it and just take out what we need for a meal. It's just so good.
I was thinking as I worked with it, how much smarter this kind of processing we do now than in the past when we had a giant pot of water steaming up the kitchen for so long and boiling out all the nutrition. It's smarter, and tastes better, AND saves on the utilities. Good all the way.
And finally, our very own golden corn. Great stuff.
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