Deer, Take II

Earlier I described a few ways I tried to keep deer out of my garden last year.  They were mostly unsuccessful.  One that was partly successful was a motion-activated sprinkler.  I set it to maximum sensitivity and it would fire a five-second blast of water when triggered.  It seemed to limit the damage, but there was one major problem: the hose bib in the back of the house is right next to the master bedroom.  I could hear the water start and stop for each five-second blast; it woke me up at night.  A couple of times it would fire twice in a couple of minutes; I'd get up and go outside to look; I'd see deer.  However, multiple alerts every night was not really going to work for me.   I only used it for a couple of weeks (if that) then gave up for the year.

So far, this year I am having success with a higher fence.  The original fence was four-foot chicken wire, with one foot bent horizontal as a deterrent to digging under the fence.  That is now buried under grass and thatch.  It works pretty well against rabbits, but doesn't deter deer.

So I drove in some more seven-foot t-posts (in addition to the ones from last year that I strung the twine on) and added another three-foot band of chicken wire.  I stitched it to the bottom section with the remants of the twine, plus some new line.

It's ugly.  It's not at all straight, symmetric, or anything else.  But it's working ok, so I'm not unhappy with it.  So far the only thing I've had to deal with is voles / mice (or whatever they are); they went after my green beans hard when they first started to climb the trellis.  Some Tomcat bait took care of them in short order; the bait was gnawed on; the bean damage stopped; and I smelled something rotting out there about a week after placing the bait.

For the gate I drove two posts and fashioned hooks out of nine-gauge wire I have for a future kiwi trellis.  I lashed the hooks to the posts with 16-gauge wire, then hung a section of welded wire fencing that is about four feet high and six feet long (I hung it sideways).  That's also ugly, but also working.

These pictures show the garden before anything was growing there.  Now it's more populated, with okra, cucumbers, Kentucky Wonder green beans on one of the trellises, tomato plants, some late-planted Blue Clarage, and lots o' weeds.  So far, other than the vole issue with the green beans, most has been well.  Stink bugs like the green beans and tomatoes, and Japanese beetles have been seen on the green beans and okra.  Those problems are manageable.  Deer that clear-cut the okra in one night are not.

Whole Wheat Apple Pie

I've long had an interest in making a whole wheat (w/w) pie crust.  I definitely prefer w/wt bread, and have made w/w brownies, cake, and other things.  Pie crust has been a challenge, however.

My latest attempt, version 3.0, didn't use 100% w/w.  I used a 50/50 mix with unbleached white flour as the other form.  The basic recipe is a cup of flour, 1/4 cup oil, lard, butter, or shortening, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 cup of water.  The standard directions for making a flaky crust are to use butter or lard and cold water, keeping the fat as solid as possible.

I ditched that and used sunflower oil.  I've done w/w "crusts" in which I've just mixed up the above ingredients without the water, made a friable, loose mix without much cohesion, and poured it into the greased pie pan that way, then patted it roughly into shape.  That obviously only works for a bottom crust, but can do a fairly decent job for a pie that normally only has a bottom crust, like pecan, pumpkin, or sweet potato.

For version 3.0, I went ahead and rolled it out with w/w flour-covered bottom and top layers of waxed paper.  In the dish, before the top crust, it looked like what's shown at right.  As you can see, my edges weren't that smooth.  My rolled-out crusts look more like an amoeba than a smooth-edged disk.  However, I more or less got something I could use.

The finished product was not that good (and as you can see below, definitely not ready for competition in the nearest county fair).  W/w flour is denser than white; I would say I ended up more with something like a stuffed-crust pizza (that happened to have cinnamon and apple slices as the filling) than a pie.  While it wasn't all that great, it was still usable.  I will probably lighten up on the w/w content next time.  I gave a slice to a friend at work, who thought it was fine.

This was not made with the Striped June apples.  I canned the filling last fall, following the recipe on the NCHFP site.  I made it sugar free, using Whey Low in place of sugar. It was mostly GoldRush and Stayman apples, with a few Arkansas Blacks and maybe a Yates or two thrown in.   That's a subject for another day.

In Praise of the Striped June

I harvested my Striped June (also known as Margaret) apple tree on Sunday (July 19).  This is an old tree, planted through the the diligence and foresight of the man who owned the land before me.  The total take was about 20 pounds, which is maybe a bit small for a mature semi-dwarf tree, but it was neglected for a long time before I began caring for it.  I've pruned it some, which has helped.  This year I neglected it; I didn't thin the crop much and didn't do any spraying (for disease or plum curculio, so I'm just lucky--for now--that the nasty bugs haven't found it).

Despite the name, it usually ripens in July.  Still, that makes it a summer apple.  It's an old variety.  The only way you'll get one these days is to go to a nursery that specializes in old apples, like Big Horse Creek Farm.  Striped June is somewhat tart/sweet.  Partly that might be due to harvesting a bit too soon, but the apples were looking good Sunday, with a few already on the ground.  So I picked it clean.  I'm not out there every day--this isn't in my back yard; it's a ways away--so there wasn't any viable alternative.  As you can see, the apples aren't exactly ready for retail.  Most have some degree of insect damage (though I've verified that mostly it's just a few small divots, not really affecting anything else), and many of them have sooty blotch and/or flyspeck.  Both of those are benign plant diseases that don't affect anything.  They can be rubbed off the skin with a wet paper towel and some diligence if you must, but as far as I know, they're harmless.  They certainly don't affect fruit quality, except for visual appeal.  I also see russeting on a lot of them, not all, and that doesn't bother me, either.

Here's an interesting thing about Striped June/Margaret: According to a Jurassic PDF from Auburn University I stumbled across one day, it's resistant to cedar-apple rust.  Look on page eight of the PDF (which, surprisingly, is searchable).  Early Red Margaret, which I assume is the same apple that I have, was found to be free of cedar apple rust way back in 1908.  I have cedars near where the apple tree is growing.  The woods have cedars here and there, and there was a huge one about 50 feet away from the tree, which I cut down with a friend.  There's still one within 100 yards.  And there are others.  I saw galls on the closest one.  The disease can travel some distance (it's transmitted back and forth between the two species, and others--like serviceberry--get involved, too).  I have another apple out there that has issues with cedar-apple rust, getting it every year (so far).  I planted a modern disease-resistant variety, GoldRush, another of the PRI apples I have, along with a few others.  GoldRush, alas, while resistant to some of the worst diseases plaguing apples, is susceptible to cedar-apple rust.  The new apple trees are too young to set any fruit yet, so we'll see what happens.  GoldRush did have a small one this year but it fell off (as do a lot of the leaves about now). At any rate, my Striped June has always been rust-free (at least for the few growing seasons I have had it).

So did the guy who planted it select it for that reason?  It might date back to the 1960s or so.  Given some of the other things I see out there, it was probably carefully chosen rather than selected at random from whatever was available in the nursery trade back then.

Some of the other resistant varieties in the Auburn circular are available if you look hard enough, but again, you won't find them at a big-box retailer (with the possible exception of Arkansas, which I assume is the Arkansas Black--that's a not entirely uncommon apple, but it's not exactly one of the major ones, either.  It's available from all or most of the nurseries I list at the left).

So now I have 20 pounds of apples to process.  I will probably dry all or most of them, but I might also do something else with some.  As a summer apple, I don't expect a long shelf life.

I never would have planted it, but I'm happy to have it.  I just need to make the time to make the most of it by ensuring none of the harvest goes to waste.

Preserving Tomatoes

I grow mostly indeterminate tomatoes.  The darker ones, like Black Prince and Cherokee Purple, are my favorites.  A couple of years I grew Frankenstein Black and liked them very much.  At any rate, some years my tomato harvest is a bust.  Deer will eat the plants but don't seem to go for them very often, and stink bugs can be found on them but do not seem to do too much damage.  Even in good years the best I get a slow, steady level of production that is very drawn out over a period of weeks.  I pick them as they ripen (or a little before, then let them ripen indoors).

I do two things with tomatoes (well, three, counting tomato sandwiches).  One is dehydrate them, the other is can them following the NCHFP's recipe for crushed tomatoes.  I then use the tomatoes for a sort of spaghetti sauce that ends up being somewhat runny and very chunky once I add the onions. It's not like Prego, but I still like it. Normally I don't grow paste tomatoes (though I did like the Amish Paste ones I raised one year), so the end product is pretty watery (see below).

Canning requires peeling the tomatoes, which I'm definitely not a fan of (I also hate peeling peaches).  So it's not my first choice, and I find that when I can them, it takes me a while to use them.  I'll use them, but slowly. And, btw, I wouldn't characterize the peeling process as "slip[ping]  off [the] skins."

I haven't done them for a few years, and the last time I did I failed to note the raw amount I needed for the canner load I processed.  So the NCHFP guidelines are probably as good as any.  This can require stocking them in the refrigerator for a few days to build up enough supply to make canning worthwhile.  I'm not going to go through all that work for two or three pints.  I've heard that some don't like refrigerating tomatoes, but it has worked out okay for me.

Dehydrating is another matter.  It's easy to process the tomatoes in small batches as they come in.  Then I just cut the tops off, cut them into 4-8 radial slices, and thrown them in the dehydrator.  They dry down quickly, in 24-48 hours (at 135 degrees; using a cooler temp would extend the time).

Dehydrating them is a little problematic for other reasons: I eat them too fast.  I like the end result very much and down them as snack food.  I think they could be rehydrated, put on pizza, or otherwise used in recipes, but so far I've just eaten them about as fast as I produce them (that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much).

My tomatoes usually stop producing in August or so, then start blooming and producing again with the cooler temperatures of late summer and early fall.  I always have green tomatoes on the vine at the time of the first frost.  There's a recipe for pickled green tomatoes that looks appealing but that I have never made.  I usually try to ripen them, then end up tossing them when that doesn't happen.  Maybe this year...

Taking Advantage of Peak Blueberry Season

Here in GA, blueberries are usually at their most available and least costly a couple of weeks on either side of July 4th. Sometimes there's another period of similar pricing in mid-August.  While fresh ones can be had year-round, and are readily available from about April through September, they can be expensive outside of peak North American production months.  What's showing up now are berries from New Jersey; recently it was North Carolina; before that it was Georgia and Florida; soon it will be Michigan.  Georgia, btw, is the biggest producer of blueberries in the country (at least in 2014, but production has been ramping up a lot in the last few years).

For me, 2014 was a good year, too--my five rabbiteye blueberry bushes produced 20 pounds.  This year, about a handful.  In late March, it dropped to about 24 degrees when the plants were nearly in
full bloom.  I tried hosing them down at 4 am, to no avail.

So I'm on the blueberry market this year.  I like them and eat a fair amount.  If you want them year-round, it makes sense to stock up now.  While you can get them later, you can end up paying more than shown at right for less than half as many. That's what they were going for at Sam's Club yesterday.

If you buy now, you need to preserve them somehow.  The easiest is freezing, and I froze about 6 pounds' worth today (and froze the same last summer from my own bushes).  I use frozen ones for pies.  Another way is to make preserves, which I also did last year.  And they can be dehydrated.

Dehydrating is pretty easy.  I pick over them to pull out the moldy ones (sometimes that isn't an issue, but it often is with store-bought berries), wash them, dump them onto a dehydrator tray, and subject them to a 135-degree breeze for two days.  What's left is a pile of shriveled berries dry enough to keep without molding in the container.

Some people recommend poking each berry with a toothpick, and you can see why at the right.  Some of them end up looking like little balloons--however, they will still dry out even if not pricked.  That's too much time and effort, and if I tried to do it, I'd still miss some.  I shy away from methods that require intensive handling or processing whenever possible.


One does have to be careful to check to be sure they are really dried out.  I did lose a whole container of berries one time to mold because I didn't get them sufficiently dehydrated.  So I'm a little paranoid about it now.

Some fruits I do not particularly like when dehydrated, but blueberries are okay.  I probably prefer fresh ones, but this is definitely a case of constrained optimization: is a dehydrated blueberry worth at least 40% of a fresh one?  At times, that's the price differential.

It took me a while to get into the swing of various food preservation methods, and I'm still learning new ones (plus learning which ones don't work).  With my own trees, bushes, and garden, it's a must, but it makes sense sometimes with store-bought produce, as well.

Cornbread

I'm not very innovative with recipes.  Usually I just replicate something I find somewhere.  Usually that works fairly well; I can't think of very many disasters I've had in the kitchen.

One recipe that I have altered a little bit with surprising results is what I use for cornbread.  I found this one online:

2 cups cornmeal
2/3 cups flour (not specified, but I assume all-purpose or maybe bread)
1/2 Tbsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
3-4 Tbsp of bacon drippings or oil

Bake at  400 for 25 min.


I modified it to use whole wheat flour and added 2 Tbsp. vital wheat gluten to help the rise (not necessary, but it seemed to be beneficial versus not using it). I also used 3 Tbsp. of sunflower oil, since I don't usually (or ever) have bacon drippings.  The whole wheat flour plus vital wheat gluten required more buttermilk, so I used 2 cups and baked it for 30 min at 400 degrees. I also used an 8" greased Pyrex dish instead of cast iron.  That all worked okay, then one day I made a mistake and dumped 1/2 Tbsp. of baking soda in the bowl.  I decided to essentially switch the soda and powder, and put 3/4 tsp. baking powder in the mix, added a tsp of white vinegar, and kept everything else the same.

It worked.  It was good enough that I made the switch permanently, though I no longer add the vinegar--it does not seem to be necessary.  The flavor is slightly different, but it's fine (as far as I'm concerned).  Plus it rises more when baking and seems to stay moist longer.  It takes me a while to go through the whole dish of cornbread, and the original recipe got rather dry.  The new one is not so affected.  Adding more salt, 1 tsp total, will make it seem moister still.  When I have baked it for others, they liked it saltier. I don't use 1 tsp when baking just for myself, however.

The pictures show the process with Blue Clarage cornmeal (above is two cups of cornmeal; below is the finished product).

Dehydrating Apples

I harvested my Williams' Pride apple tree yesterday.  It's an early-maturing apple, but this is a bit earlier than early, so some of them were not quite ready.  As the link notes, Williams' Pride is an apple that matures slowly, so should be picked more than once.  I went ahead and pulled almost all of them (except for a couple) because 1) I knew I was going to dehydrate them, and 2) some of the apples were getting attacked by bugs and were getting watercore.  As the page above (and this one) note, Watercore is a problem of Williams' Pride, particularly if left on the tree to maturity.  Watercore does not necessarily ruin the fruit, but it also doesn't help it much.  So I harvested them. The picture at right shows watercore at the left side of the slice (the water on the plate ran off the slice itself; I had just pulled it out of the water bath described below). More (and more positive) information on watercore can be found here.


My harvest was modest--the tree is still relatively young, and I didn't really properly manage it this year.  I neglected all of my apples (I have three in production, with several more that haven't started fruiting yet).  Last year I got a mere two and a half pounds; this year I've pulled four pounds so far, but there is another pound on the tree and a number were ruined by disease or insects while on the tree.

My approach to dehydrating apples is pretty simple.  I'm all about making things easy.  I prepare a bowl with some citric acid and water to dunk the apples in after slicing (to limit browning), then use one of the radial-style apple slicers to core and slice the apples into eight wedges.  Some people spiral slice them using something like this, but that's slower and more of a hassle.  Then I just place them skin-down on the trays of my dehydrator (I have a nine-tray Excalibur; it can hold about 12 pounds [when cutting slices as described above, I have to pull out every other tray to allow room for the thicker pieces before they dry down and shrink]).  Currently, I'm setting the temp to 135, what they recommend for fruit, and drying them for two to three days.  I used to use a lower temperature, 125, to hopefully reduce vitamin loss, but that took forever.  I dry them until they are pretty firm so they won't spoil while in storage.  They may not snap when I'm done with them, but they are far from tender.  My big wedge-shaped slices are more of a mouthful than the ones you'd get with a cranked slicer, and require a lot of chewing. Nonetheless, I like them.  I actually like dried apples better than fresh ones.  This is how they look when dehydrated:

This is not the only thing I do with apples--I also make applesauce and apple pie filling (subjects for another day).

Growing Corn, Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous post, which was getting long.

Growing degree days (GDDs) can be used to examine the challenges of growing some kinds of corn in cooler climates.  As I mentioned last time, I've been growing mostly Blue Clarage, which is about a 100-day corn; Chad Lee's presentation suggests that about 2400 GDDs are needed to get the crop to maturity; last year I harvested at 2677.  I planted the first week of June (Georgia has a pretty long growing season).  If you live in a cooler climate, you might have a hard time growing a 100-day corn.  For example, in 2014, there were only about 2000 GDDs in Presque Isle, ME--for the entire growing season. Leadville, CO got about 1200, but probably everyone understands that not much can be grown at 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies.  Coeur D'Alene, ID was a little better last year; just over 2500, but that's not much margin for error--especially considering that frost in May is common there.  Had you planted June 1, the remaining GDDs would've been more like 2000.

So in colder climes, flint and sometimes flour corn are more commonly grown.  Anthony Boutard has written a book titled, "Beautiful Corn" that I should've linked to last time, in which he discusses the different varieties of corn and the places / climates they are grown.  He is also featured in a few videos on YouTube:  A Farmer and His Corn, A Sustainable Farmer Talks Corn, A Cornfield in Winter, and others.  He mentions Blue Clarage in his book, as well as Oaxacan Green, another type I have grown, but doesn't say much about them (he wasn't impressed with Oaxacan Green, and  neither was I the one year that I tried it).  Most flints seem to be around 90-100 days, i.e., probably about 2200-2400 GDDs--not all that much less than some dents.  However, at least one seed vendor sells a variety, Gaspe Flint, with a claimed 45-60 days (GDD equivalent would be... not much--maybe 1400-1670 GDDs?  That's a slightly informed guess based on Chad Lee's figures, which are not completely linear. I just did a quick OLS regression, but I think that's close enough for now). That would still be marginal at best for Leadville, but would work fine for much of New England--where flints have been grown for a long time--and the northern tier of states out west.

I don't need to explore flint corn all that much, and I think given what I'm using my corn for, dent is better--so far I have mostly made cornbread with it, though after a visit to Paula Deen's restaurant in Savannah, I tried to do hoecakes--hers were better.  So cornbread it is for now.

Earlier I mentioned that small stands need to be more intensively managed.  That's mostly because of pollination issues.  Corn is wind pollinated, though as the photos below show, bees do like corn pollen--they just aren't interested in spreading it to the silks.

Corn tassels are visible quite some time before pollination actually occurs. When the tassel starts shedding pollen, you'll see anthers (visible as dangly things hanging off the tassel in the picture below) drop down.  They'll shed pollen for at least a few days to a week, and often they will start shedding a few days before silks emerge--which can cause great consternation.  When the silks begin to emerge, they will be receptive to pollen for a few days.  If you have just a few plants, you can't count on getting good kernel set if you let nature take its course, so you can force the issue.

At Pioneer, we would put shoot bags on the emerging shoots (which would later turn into ears) before silk emergence.  The shoot bags look like little coin envelopes but are a much lighter-weight paper.  When the silks finally broke through--we checked each plant each day--we would bag the tassel with something that looked like a lunch sack.  On each sack the crop heat units (CHUs, analogous to GDDs) accumulated as of the day before would be stamped to enable the nursery staff to chart that aspect of each variety's development.

We would leave the tassel bag up for one day, then the next afternoon slap it a couple of times and undo it carefully (so as not to dump the pollen prematurely), then pull off the shoot bag as we upended the tassel bag over the shoot.  It was a little more complicated than that, with a few additional quality control measures, but basically that was it.

That process wouldn't necessarily work well for a home gardener.  In the first place, if you're growing open-pollinated corn, you probably have at least some interest in keeping seed and planting it in the future (though with few plants in the ground, you'll suffer inbreeding yield loss if you do that for very many generations). So you don't necessarily want plant A's pollen to go on plant A's silks, but when A is shedding pollen plant B might not have entered R1 yet.  What I have done with small plantings is go out at dusk with a simple 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, folded in the middle to make a crease, then opened back up.  I tap the branches of the tassels shedding pollen onto the paper, then the fold helps me dump the pollen I get from the tapping onto whatever silks are ready to be pollinated that day.  I do this nightly, hitting silks on various plants more than once over several days, until there's no more pollen being shed.  At dusk the wind usually seems to be muted here, so that helps control things. Too much wind would make it difficult to get pollen onto the paper. When you tap a tassel over a plain white sheet of paper, you'll be able to see the corn pollen if there is any: it's bright yellow. Eventually the anthers will run out of pollen; they may still be dangling but they'll be translucent--after you look at a few in varying states, it'll be easy to tell when a tassel is pretty much done.  Since corn is a wind pollinated plant, the pollen granules are also microscopically barbed, so the the paper also needs to be tapped a bit to get the pollen off the paper onto the silks.  The pollen also hooks into people; I used to itch terribly during pollen season.  I was the only pollinator who wore long sleeves in the field, but still had some troubles.  It also has a pronounced fragrance...

Anyway.  Pollinating your plants yourself, you can get filled out ears even if you only have a few stalks growing.  It really is not much trouble.  If you want to take a hands-off approach and rely on the wind, there are things you can do to improve kernel set.  Planting corn in rectangular blocks helps with wind pollination.  If you want to have about 30 row feet of corn, plant 6 rows of 5 feet each, 4 rows of 8 feet, or something similar instead of one or two longer rows.  Corn can also be planted in hills, with small groups of plants every few feet.  I have never done this, but the concept seems to be pretty reasonable.  Basically, you just want to do what you can to ensure that the wind helps pollinate the crop, regardless of what direction it's coming from.

As shown at right, I had three rows that were about six feet long each.  My corn was too crowded, because I didn't thin aggressively enough.  So I had to give them water and fertilizer (mostly blood meal), more so than I would have had to if they had been planted with wider spacing.

I figured this plant arrangement was good enough for pollination, so didn't do anything for them myself.  Blue Clarage usually sets one ear per stalk; often there are two.  Sometimes there will be a third shoot, but it in my experience it never amounts to much of anything.  This is fine.  I got the collection of ears shown at the left from the plot above.  There's one completely undeveloped ear that I included just to show what it looked like.  Most of my ears were pretty full, except for the tips.  I was pleased.

As noted in the first part, there are a few pest and disease issues.  I have never had to deal with smut, for which I'm glad.  I did get a fair amount of rust last summer.  When I watered the corn--which, as I said, I had to do because it was planted too close together--I used an overhead sprinkler.  People tell you not to wet the foliage when watering, but I figured rain wets it, so I can, too.  It was easier to do it that way than to thread a soaker hose in between the rows or come up with another approach.  So the leaves did get wet whenever I watered, but that was only once per week during dry spells.  The late summer was very dry last year, so there was a lot of watering.  Rust can cut yields, according to some ag extension sites, so I did try treating with daconil a couple of times, to no apparent effect.  The yield was still okay.


I did have problems with stink bugs.  Brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSB) are moving into this area, and they like corn. There are also native brown and green stink bugs; the differences between the native brown stink bugs and BMSB are subtle, as shown here   Mostly I had brown ones, but I found a few green stink bugs on the plants, too.  They suck juice out of the kernels.  At right is a closeup of some of the ears; the mottled macerated-looking kernels were attacked by stink bugs.  I'm assuming they (the kernels) will be okay since the wretched beasts excrete their foul juice from their abdomens--any of that went on the shucks, which were disposed of.

How to deal with stink bugs?  You can spray an insecticide like Sevin, spinosad, or malathion; I just went out there at least once a day with a can filled with soapy water.  I was pretty successful at getting them into the can, where they soon drowned.  I would say I found on average about 20 per afternoon / evening every day for about three weeks; then the corn reached a dry enough stage that the stink bugs were no longer all that interested.

The UGA guidance gives different thresholds at which treatment is recommended (they suggest different insecticides; the target audience is commercial growers).  I definitely had stink bugs present in numbers that would have warranted chemical controls if replicated across an entire field.

BMSB are going to become more prevalent in Georgia in coming years, so pest management will be a bigger issue with corn going forward.

Growing Corn, Part 1

I love corn.  It's simultaneously easy and tricky to grow, suffers few pests and diseases compared to some other garden plants, and is very productive.

When I say I love corn, I'm talking about dent corn, primarily.  I have grown sweet corn, and definitely like eating it right off the cob--raw or cooked somehow.  But sweet corn has issues when it comes to home gardening.

Preserving sweet corn is a hassle.  It can be cut off the cob and frozen, but what a mess.  It can be dried (on the plant or cut off and put in a dehydrator), but why bother?  At that point you basically have dent corn.  Or sweet corn can be frozen on the cob.  Some method of preservation would be needed with any decent amount of production because non-super sweet  (mostly open-pollinated heritage) varieties have to be picked then eaten or preserved within a fairly narrow time window. Some method of preservation would be needed even with super sweets, which are more stable once picked (thus enabling you to buy them in the store days after picking).  Staggering planting is one option, but then you run into pollination issues.  You will have to more intensively manage things if you try planting six corn seeds per week in the spring.

Dent corn is more limited for fresh eating, but it is possible (and although I keep mentioning dent, these comments would also apply to varying degrees to flour, flint, and popcorn).  I have eaten Blue Clarage dent corn in the milk stage and thought it was fine as a sweet corn (though I might not be a corn connoisseur, so I'm not guaranteeing others would like it).  A stand of dent could conceivably provide for summer corn on the cob as well as cornbread and more for months afterward.  Of course, making cornbread requires shelling (discussed  previously) and then grinding, which could be considered hassles in their own way.  Popcorn eaten as popcorn is probably the easiest way to use a non-sweet variety, with parching a close second (something I have no experience with or [for now] interest in, following an inauspicious introduction to Corn Nuts when I was in high school).

There are some potential pitfalls with home-scale corn production.  The first is the need for nitrogen.  Corn is notoriously greedy when it comes to nitrogen, and at varying times of its growth cycle, it needs a lot of it.  It will deplete whatever's there and look for more.  You can provide a gentle boost of nitrogen to the soil around the developing plants by spreading compost, fresh grass clippings, or side-dressing with a fertilizer: either 10-10-10, lawn fertilizer, blood meal, or something similar.  As the figure shows, about 75% of the plant's total nitrogen uptake happens by or around the time of tassling (VT) and silking (R1).  What this means is you need to be giving it nitrogen fertilizer as it's growing and putting on leaves before you see tassels--if you wait until then, you have potentially compromised your harvest.

After R1, however, a lot of the plant's total phosphorous needs are still to be met--that's something worth keeping in mind.  University extension services provide more information than this on their sites, particularly those located in corn country.

The growth stages, btw, are pretty simple.  Anything with a V refers to the vegetative stage and happens before the silks appear.  Once the silks emerge, the plant is in the reproductive phase, identified by Rx, where x=1, 2,...6.

Sweet corn is picked in the milk stage, or R3.  This typically happens about 18-22 days after silking, according to this site (the picture to the right is actually clickable at the site, allowing you to get information about each stage).  Other sites will tell you to partially shuck an ear, exposing the tip, and pierce a kernel with your fingernail--if the fluid is milky in appearance, it's ready to pick.  However, if you don't keep an eye on it, it will rapidly progress into R4, the dough stage, where it will still work as sweet corn but will be rapidly trending in a direction you won't like for fresh eating.

When I was in school I worked for several summers at a Pioneer Hi-Bred research nursery, where we worked with new corn varieties.  Mostly we pollinated them, inbreeding them for several generations to see if bad traits emerged. We also challenged them with insect and disease pests (maybe challenge isn't the right word, because they hadn't necessarily been provided any defense against the pests--but my understanding of what was going on at the time was limited).  At any rate, the company always planted some ranges of sweet corn for employee use; one year we were given some at the appropriate time--which was fine--and I tried to pick and eat a couple of ears later in the summer after it had reached R4 or even later.  It was still edible, but not that good.  As noted above, diligent monitoring is important to get it at the right time.  Harvesting dent or flint is easier: just let it dry down on the plant, then pick.

Something else about timing a sweet corn harvest:  Going by the days listed on the seed packet is not necessarily the best approach (although using the 18-22 days mentioned above for R3 after silk emergence will probably work okay in most cases).  The advertised days to harvest (e.g.,  78 days for Honey 'n' Pearl, the variety planted by Pioneer for us pollinators during that summer mentioned above) are only approximations. They probably apply to corn belt conditions.  Corn growth can be more precisely tracked with degree days.  This link and (better) this link (both from the University of Kentucky) provide information on degree days (see slides 16 and following in Chad Lee's presentation).  The calculations are simple enough, but you won't want to do them manually for each day after planting.  Fortunately, online calculators are available.  Here is one:

Pioneer Hi-Bred Calculator

Georgia has them for the state, as do others (for Georgia, pick a station and then go to the degree day calculator: base temperature 50, disregard temps above 86).  Pioneer's is nationwide.  To use it, you want growing degree units, GDUs, not crop heat units, CHUs, if you want to use the general guidelines in the UKY presentation.

Chad Lee's presentation doesn't mention R3, the most relevant stage for sweet corn, because it's not that relevant for corn harvested as grain.  If I had planted sweet corn on April 1 this summer (which I didn't), I would've experienced about 1950 GDD so far. The figures he presented at the top of Slide 18 refer to maturity, or R6.  Using straight line extrapolation for the figures he presented for a 2700 GDD hybrid, R3 would be expected to occur at 1920 GDDs.  That suggests now might be a good time to harvest, but it would also be about 93 days after planting... sticking to about three weeks after silking is probably a better approach.  At R1 you know what stage the kernels are at, but the time from planting to silking is going to be somewhat variable.

Last summer I planted Blue Clarage, which Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (my source) lists as a 100-day variety. Chad Lee's presentation suggests about 2400 GDDs are needed to get it to maturity; I harvested it at 2677 GDDs.  It was obviously drying down at about 2400 GDDs and I probably could've harvested it then.  The picture at right shows how the little stand looked at the time of harvest (along with the failed deer abatement method I mentioned a couple of weeks ago).  As noted previously, about the only thing I got out of the garden last year was corn.


There are some other things worth mentioning about corn, but this has gone way long so I'll take that up another time.

Shelling Corn

I'll write in more detail another time about growing, harvesting, and using corn, but this is all about what happens post-harvest and pre-consumption.  I'm talking here about dent corn, grown and dried down on the plant, then shelled and ground into meal (usually) or shelled and roasted for parched corn (which I have never done).

For just a few ears, shelling by hand is possible, but it rapidly gets unworkable when the number of ears to shell increase.  For a larger amount, some kind of sheller is useful.  There are little handheld ones that might be viable (and are certainly better than twisting with your bare hands), but a cranked sheller will be fast and save much pain and suffering.

This is a link to a video featuring a big one in action, and the amount of corn it can shell is amazing.

International Harvester Corn Sheller in Action

Although he seems to be shelling for animal feed (given that he's putting it into a kitty litter bucket), there's no reason you couldn't get one of these and shell corn for your own use (I eat all of my corn at present, since I have no livestock--for now).  However, as far as I know, the only way to get one of these big floor-mounted machines is to buy it on eBay.  In decent condition they usually go for $300 or more, and even in bad condition they are expensive.

Smaller ones are more practical for a lot of reasons, and their throughput is very good, although not as great as the standalone model.

Small Corn Sheller


The one in the video above is new manufacture, but antique ones are available on eBay, too--new ones go for about $70+ and used ones on eBay sell for a wide range of prices, anywhere from $50 to $300 or more.  The antique ones are often in bad shape, but many have been taken care of or are reconditioned.   They're generally cast iron, so liable to be rusted, but can be sandblasted and repainted.  I have bid for several and never won one.  The new ones are sold by a few places; there is sometimes a vendor that lists them on eBay (they usually settle at a price around $75, +/- $25, the last time I checked).  Pleasant Hill Grain sells one, too.  I have seen it as cheap as $49, but it's currently closer to $70.

Pleasant Hill Grain Corn Sheller

Video:  Pleasant Hill Grain Corn Sheller

That's where mine came from (it was a Christmas present), and I just ordered another one.  The reason I mention Pleasant Hill is that, while I don't know of a corn sheller shortage or a reason large numbers of people would be trying to buy these, they have been out of stock for some time (update 7/3: they are showing as back in stock).  This could all mean that nobody buys them so they are only ordering ten at a time, but if you're expecting to have use for one and like the looks of it, it may be worth backordering if it's not immediately available.

Lehman's also sells corn shellers; a crank-operated version and one of the small handheld one-ear-at-a-time types:

Lehman's Corn Shellers

To use these, you can mount them to a wooden box, or in some cases a 2x4 over a bucket--although the corn will scatter a bit as you crank, so there will be some that gets flung outside the bucket if you do it this way.  I slowly and incompetently threw a box together out of scrap lumber, and it works--the mounting system has changed for the Pleasant Hill sheller since I got mine, so a different arrangement will be called for with the new one than I used for the old one.  You can shell corn pretty quickly; I shelled the basket above in just a few minutes, and I wasn't rushing myself.   Then it's necessary (or at least preferable) to pour the corn between a couple of buckets in front of a fan to get rid of the chaff and bits of cob.

These shellers are marketed as walnut dehullers, too (there's even a place that sells them for that purpose; video is also available [though I know nothing else about the company]).  I have a couple of black walnut trees and just planted a third, so processing black walnuts is something I'm interested in.  My current method is very  s l o w.  I haven't tried running my freshly harvested walnuts through my sheller yet... seems like it'd make a mess and I always have lots of husk fly larvae in mine.  So I do it the non-automated way.  That's a topic for another day.