Many ask our secret to growing such great tasting corn. I have been working in area sweet corn fields since my pre-teen years. I used to think that it was simply the terroir of the soil. Then I took on more fields and began to find that our corn tasted great everywhere. Now I think the secret to our corn flavor is the growing technique mixed with the specific terroir. You will find that in general our corn ears are not huge. We grow for quality, not quantity.

I am very surprised with the nice flavor of the corn with this year's drought. The drought has been very harsh for the rain loving corn. In one field last week we decided to stop irrigating a section of corn and beans and just let them go. There simply was not enough water available to sustain all the crops at that farm. Yet, in the last week we have received an inch of rain. This inch is far from what is needed to make up the deficit, but we will let nature follow its course and see what happens to the non-irrigated corn and beans. All of our cultivated fields are irrigated, but they are irrigated only as long as there is a water source to pump the water from and onto the crops. Even the corn that we have been irrigating is showing signs of drought stress. The first sign is what we call "dry tips". In this case the corn plant decided that there was a scarcity of water and so it would be best to create a good short ear of kernels rather than a long ear of poor kernels. This is a quite common occurrence in corn that needs to be irrigated. If you miss a certain window of opportunity, or if the corn did not receive as much water as it fully needed, the corn ear will prematurely terminate in its length and leave a "dry tip". Most farms that are harvesting any corn this year, are finding a lot of "dry tips".

This year we have also seen more poor pollination issues in the corn as a result of the drought. Normally the pollen falls from the tassels onto the silk and then travels down to pollinate each kernel. Fresh silk has some of the highest water content of the corn plant until it dries out. The drought has caused some of the silk to be too dry to transfer the pollen to the kernels. This may have led you to find some ears of corn with unformed kernels on one side. I sample a lot of our corn raw and cooked. While these ears of corn might not look perfect, they sure are tasting just fine. We would ask that you overlook the imperfections of our corn and are hopefully enjoying the ears that we are able to bring to harvest.

Farmer Dave