I brought you in, I take you out!
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Ever since I returned to the country, I've had this thing about growing corn! It's corn that says summer. It's corn that my taste buds call for and it's corn that tastes more marvelous than anything else straight from the garden. But, alas, corn-growing still alludes me, the intrepid (if not all-knowing) gardener. Reign's got corn. Betty's got corn. But the California Sisters have no corn!
Tooltime Tim and I tried growing corn again this year. I'd prepared the soil in Tim's corral with the help of Dad's tractor and disc that we transplanted from Oregon to Ramona. Then Triple T and I planted a whole corral full of sweet corn and a couple weeks later added several rows of Indian corn seed we'd salvaged. The latter came up like gang-busters and the former rose to the surface rather haphazardly, prompting me to plant several rows of it over again.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, I'd thrown some left-over Halloween pumpkins along the edge of the field last December, anticipating they would seed themselves come spring, since they'd done that very thing last year in my compost pile, threatening a yard takeover.
They did come up. By April the pumpkins were happy campers, by May they were meandering everywhere, in June they started putting on fruit and in July we discovered several bushel-basket size pumpkins.
The weeds up in the corral have been delighted all along with my fertilizing. The raccoons are enjoying my Indian corn which is not yet at the decorative stage. The grasshoppers are fattening themselves on all the greenery and my sweet corn, in its here-and-there formation, is less than idyllic looking — healthy and green because of all this rain we've had, but spasmodic.
So I took it out!
"You what?" said Tooltime Tim incredulously. "I mowed it all down!" I answered. "I brought it into this world, I'll take it out!"
(It's a line from Bill Cosby. Remember the story he tells about his father threatening to discipline him? "Son, I brought you into this world, I'll take you out," threatens his dad.) That's exactly how I felt about the corn. I brought it in, I'll take it out!
I hate weeds in the garden. I didn't want to use herbicide and I have no tractor-operated cultivator to work that huge field. So, I gave up and erased the whole project. There was a certain satisfaction in mowing that field level. Tim just shook his head with disbelief and said, "You did save the punkins, didn't you?"
Now, this was an emergency! I needed a corn fix! So, I called my friend Ted over in Lehigh and gasped, "I need corn!"
Ted's the one who always admonishes me not to grow corn. "I'll grow the corn," he says with a laugh. "How else will you come see me?" We've made several trips that direction and today we're going to Lehigh and get 20 dozen ears of the tastiest most wonderful corn — for starters on our winter supply! Ted's got the knack for growing corn and the tools. His corn fields, unlike mine, are perfectly planted, carefully weeded and precisely timed to yield corn, week after week until frost.
As for me and my dreams of a lush, weedless field of tall green corn, unchewed upon by grasshoppers and devoid of coons? It'll be another day in the country — another year — and we'll try again. This year, though, we'll settle for pumpkins in that field and very fat raccoons doing an Indian corn dance.
