Corn

We harvested some of our corn yesterday. We planted a lot more this year than we have before, mainly because we wanted to make our own ethanol. Just kidding. We planted more because we want to try to have enough to last us for the whole year. So, yesterday we picked our first batch that was ready. I planted the variety Silver Queen, it is one we really like the taste of and it produces really well for us overall. I was kind of worried that our corn was not going to do so well this year because I planted it a little too close together and then waited too long and forgot to thin it out. When corn is too close together it won't make ears. But, it actually turned out pretty good after all. We spent a few hours last night shucking the corn, cleaning the ears, and then blanching the ears and freezing them. Cleaning corn was one of my top least favorite things to do as a kid (the top thing on that list was hauling hay). I still hate cleaning corn but it has to be done unless you want hairy corn. One thing I was excited about was our vacuum sealer. We bought it last year and have been using it pretty often. One of the main things we bought it for was for freezing corn because it makes it much easier to get the air out of the bags which helps it to freeze better. We harvested and cleaned a total of 90 ears of corn last night. The ugly ears we cut off the cob and froze that way, the rest we froze on the cob. We will probably have at least half that much again to do at the end of this week. And, because I was worried this corn was not going to do so well, I planted some fall corn a couple weeks ago. It will be ready in a couple months. I have never done fall corn before so we will see how it does.

Here is a pic of some ears of corn in a 5 gallon bucket, we got 3 of these buckets full yesterday.


And, here is a pic of the corn after it has be shucked and cut.