“When I close my eyes at night, all I see is sweetcorn. Piles and piles of sweetcorn.”
There you have it — something a true Wisconsinite can say to a psychiatrist or the chorus of a country love song, or both. My unique upbringing allows me the perspective to regard sweetcorn as both a blessing, and a curse. Sweetcorn is the epitome of summertime. It is also the poster child for supporting local agriculture, and locally-sourced food. Seeing as though it is that time of year, let’s give a proper nod to this quintessential summer fare.
Around the time I became a fourth-grader, my dad decided it would be a good idea to grow sweetcorn. We started small, only growing enough to enjoy amongst ourselves, and to host an annual Wegmueller family gathering, where the entire purpose of getting together was to pick, shuck, boil, scrape, and freeze sweetcorn for winter. This, by the wheelbarrow load. Literally, wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of sweetcorn. As with most family gatherings, there was more stress involved than anything else, but it all paid off around Christmastime when a dish of sweetcorn superseded all of the negatives associated with physical labor amongst family.
Somewhere along the line, someone suggested to my Dad that he “ought to sell sweetcorn.” In typical fashion, he went all-out. By the time I was in high school, our farm boasted more than three acres of land dedicated to growing sweetcorn. On the surface, sweetcorn is the perfect summer food. If plucked fresh off the stalk in its prime, sweetcorn is delicious raw — the kernels pop with sweet, juicy flavor, no need for butter or salt. The fresher, and more local, the better. Once sweetcorn goes through any shipping and handling, it becomes starchy and rubbery. As a farm kid, I’ve witnessed people gnawing on store-bought cobs like gristle, cooing on how delicious it was. As with all farm-fresh versus store-bought food, if they only knew the difference!
Beneath the surface, sweetcorn is an amazingly labor-intensive crop, to the point that its deliciousness is almost ruined. As a plant, sweetcorn is much more fragile than field corn. More often than not, a July windstorm would twist and topple the stalks, making it all but impossible to discern the rows. To avoid the use of chemicals, we either fought a jungle of weeds or spent hours and hours hand-tilling between the stalks. And then, the raccoons.
Raccoons lie in wait, their beady little eyeballs and filthy little claws seething at the opportunity to lay an entire crop to waste. I would have more sympathy if it weren’t for their tactics — a raccoon will shred the husk of an ear of corn, take one or two bites, and then move on to the next ear. One single raccoon will destroy dozens of ears of corn in one evening which, when multiplied by a self-propagating hoard, will decimate an entire crop. To combat the orcs — I mean raccoons — one of my childhood summer tasks was to erect an electric fence around the three-acre field, which of course needed to be maintained, trimmed, and eventually a second, higher, wire added when the raccoons apparently learned how to jump.
The folksy grocery store displays with the red barns and smiling, coverall-clad farmers do little to convey the task of actually going out into a field and hand-picking sweetcorn. Step by step, stalk by stalk, each individual ear is felt for ripeness. With a quick twist, the ear snaps off the stalk. Sometimes the entire plant comes with, ripped up by the roots. In a second movement, the husk is broken from the butt of the ear, giving that streamlined profile that doesn’t puncture the bag or take up extra space.
Plunk — the ear is dropped into a bucket. Easy! Only 6,000 more ears to go! At a touch, I can tell whether an ear is filled out, under ripe, smutty, wormy, raccooned, buggy, or just right. By the second or third bucket, I am soaked from the dew, and sweaty from total lack of breeze between the corn rows. My hands become soft, and inevitably my skin sliced open from the razor-sharp edges on the husks. Bugs crawl across my neck and tumble down the inside of my clothes, spiderwebs wrap around my face as I work my way forward, and my boots pick up several pounds of mud. Aah yes, the good ‘ol days!
After two or so hours of this, we have enough to sell. No need to grab breakfast — I’ve already eaten several ears raw, off the stalk. We take a truckload into town, and by afternoon milking the entire lot will be sold. My August summer days were spent mingling with repeat customers, making new ones, and reading a book under the shade of the umbrella during downtime.
Although my days of growing sweetcorn are in the past, I will always hold a special place in my heart for the hand-painted roadside signs advertising fresh, hand-picked sweetcorn. Done on the grill — 400 degrees, four minutes per three rotations, with butter and salt — there is nothing finer on a summer evening.
Still, at this time of year whenever I close my eyes, all I see is sweetcorn. Piles and piles of sweetcorn.
— Dan Wegmueller is the owner of Wegmueller Farms and his column appears regularly in the Times. His website is https://www.farmforthought.org.
