It is that time of year. The days are warm. The humidity is high and the daylight is long. Sweet corn is in season. If you are lucky and you have some that you planted you are most likely looking at what to do with it all.

I say lucky because there are so many ways that your corn crop may fail. You could get high winds and hail! you could have animals that decide you don’t really way to eat it and help you out by eating it all for you. Some decide to make their homes in your corn.

This year we did not know if would get any of our corn for a couple of reasons.

• 1. Japanese beetles. We will be doing a blog post on these Gems. What happened this year and previous years and what we did!!!

• 2. Animal pest. They are huge fans of baby sweet corn and adult corn. From Deer to squirrels to raccoons. Once more we will be doing a blog about what happened and how we dealt with them.

• 3. Nature and wind damage can ruin a crop.

But we persevered and we got an harvest of about 50 ears Which was a bit more than half of what was out in the block.

So how did we do it?

We tilled a spot. Then planted seeds https://www.earthwaytools.com/userdata/artikelen/earthway-1001-b-precision-garden-seeder-67-en-G.jpg

and waited We watched as to what was happening and we tried to stay on top of weeding and other pressures. Including pests (which we will be posting about in another post) after it is done I hope to link it here.

Then we harvested a group of ears. It sounds easy and really it was. The hard part is you have to have a good seed bed.https://dam.generac.com/ImConvServlet/imconv/3579bf4e29d55ed7b9fa755cbf611e2564e0c999/original

The tow behind tiller was a life saver this year. But, the seed bed has to be very well done in order for the seeder to work well. You can plant by hand but we wanted to focus on building our system. So the seeder got a work out.

Now that we had some corn we had to decide what we wanted to do. There are options. You can freeze raw, cooked, blanch and can, just can, you can also brine and freeze, etc etc, We took about half and then cut off the ends and placed them in ziplock bags and froze them. Done and done. Easy peezy and then when we want corn on teh cob just pull it out and finish husking or grill etc etc

We took the other half and processed them by husking,

Then we washed and stacked them

Then we cut the kernels from the cobb

Then we put the cut kernels in bags, I used the vacuum sealer but without the vacuum. I just wanted them sealed and there is a lot of moisture in the corn that would be vacuumed out so just sealed. You can of course use ziplocks or containers.

Then you freeze them. We will canning some of the second batch