Sweet Corn Trials and Tribulations

I remember being so excited as our neighbor tilled our new garden in the spring.

And then we planted our sweet corn. I've always bought corn to freeze but this year it we decided to grow our own.


It was so fun watching it grow!

Finally the early corn was almost ready to pick.

This is the later variety. Getting really big and kinda heavy.

As you can see from this picture it was so heavy that it started to fall from the wind. Two days later we had a really bad storm and it was ALL BLOWN DOWN. All of it, laying flat on the ground. (sniffle, sob!)

Well.... let me tell ya something. Pick a bad emotion and I felt it. What could we do?? We had no twine or anything to tie it up with and Kevin thought it was hopeless. How in the world do you tie up 40 feet by 40 feet of corn?

Well, I was desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures.

Luckily we had our cucumbers growing next to the corn and we had put up a fence for them to climb up. (They didn't.) But it proved useful in the corn dilemma.

I grabbed the only item in our house that was long, really really, long. Strapping tape!

Kevin told me that I was crazy but I had to try it. I taped up a little of the corn and it seemed like maybe it would work! It was getting late so he said we could try something the next day.

We took a couple rolls of tape out and strapped and strapped. We wove it all along the length and then wove it side to side all along the corn, from one fence to the other, sticking it to itself along the rows in between the stalks.

It may have been a little unorthodox but it worked!

Our neighbors must think that we're crazy.

That tape has held through weeks of rain and wind.

We even had a really blowy thunderstorm a few days ago and I really held my breath, watching out the window for signs of falling cornstalks but nothing.

And yesterday we had our first homegrown corn.

Til next time,

Beth