Corn Bonanza

    I’m sure readers from warmer climes chuckle when they see the photo of what I am calling a “Corn Bonanza”, but the Robson Valley is not corn country, and for us, the quantity of corn you see above is quite a remarkable haul for a garden in McBride.  I can remember only one other summer when we got so much corn.

    Every year when I plant the garden, Joan just sadly shakes her head and thinks me a fool, for planting corn.  Usually it turns out that she is right.  I feel some obligation, because of my Indiana roots to plant it, even though usually the corn I plant is plagued by cool weather or an early frost, and often the growing season ends without any ears for all my labors.  A few years ago, my corn plants were ankle high on the 4th of July, but this year they lived up to the saying, “knee high by the 4th of July”, and I got a bumper crop.

    I am about to take off on a trip to visit relatives in Indiana, and so I picked and processed all of my corn yesterday.  I remember my sister and I helping my mother blanch and freeze the corn when I was young.  On those hot summer Indiana days, we sometimes did the boiling of water outside, on a camp stove on the carport, so that all the heat wouldn’t further warm up the already warm house in those pre-air conditioner days.

    I remember the mess of the slightly sticky corn kernels that ended up scattered around the table top instead of the dish, as we cut them off of the cobs and tried to pack them into the plastic bags.  I achieved the same results in our kitchen yesterday, but now that the kitchen counter is again clean, and the corn is bagged and in the freezer, the mess I made getting to that point is easily forgotten.  

    Its too bad we can’t put in orders for the kind of summer we want.  I would certainly keep ordering the kind we had this year.

You can see my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca