Corn Harvest

Our first planting of corn is ripe and ready to pick.  Here is a sample.

Now begins the fun part.  Shucking it and getting it ready to eat!  Tom is good at this.

Quite often he runs across some damage, like this.

If you've read this blog, you know that we do not use pesticides or chemical fertilizers.  We practice organic methods in growing our produce.  We are not certified organic and probably never will be.  I checked into what we had to do to be certified and decided that it was far too much trouble (at least for the present time) and dropped the idea.

But, I digress.   The point I wanted to make is that we have to accept some loss to insects because we do not use pesticides and the above picture is an example of that.  This damage was caused by a "Corn Earworm" which is the larvae of a moth.  The caterpillar is 1 to 1.5 inches long and can range in color from pale green to pink to brown.

In the picture above, the caterpillar was not present.  Perhaps it had already completed its life cycle or crawled off somewhere.  At any rate, it was gone and Tom just trimmed the bad end off the corn cob. 

And, it was ready to cook and eat.

The next cob he shucked, however, contained a live critter!  Eeeeeek!

Sorry about that.  I hope that didn't gross some of you out!  But, as you can see the damage is mostly on the end and the rest of the cob is just fine.  As in the previous picture, he just cut the bad end off along with the caterpillar.  Even though we lose part of the cob, the caterpillars and bad pieces of corn cob are not wasted.  We feed them to the chickens and they love them.

We don't sell our corn at the market.  We don't want people buying it thinking that it is going to be like all the other corn at the market, then being upset when they find a caterpillar munching on some of it.  And, unless the corn has been sprayed with pesticide or is genetically modified, it WILL have some insect damage, like this.   So, for the most part, we just grow corn for our own use or to give away to family and friends who understand there will be extra passengers in some of the corn cobs.

Tom jokes that we should go ahead and sell it with a disclaimer that reads "Organically Grown.  Guaranteed a worm in every ear!"  But, I think that is a BAD idea!