grinding flint corn

In my Master Gardener class last year, Roger Swain taught the vegetable gardening section. His opinion on corn is to skip growing sweet corn in a home vegetable garden since it takes up a lot of space and fresh corn is so readily available at farm stands. He grows varieties for grinding instead and demonstrated grinding corn he grew using a hand mill.



Last summer I grew a small patch of flint corn in my garden - a wonderful old variety called Roy's Calais. I wanted to try grinding it for cornbread. It seemed to me that a hand grinder takes a lot of work. I was lucky to get a grain mill attachment for my Kitchen-aide mixer from my husband for Christmas.

The mill was nice and easy to use. I ended up with a cup and a half of corn meal. Just enough for corn bread. The result was a great. Buttery creamy delicious. Definitely a richer flavor than the product I buy in the store.

it popped!!

My popcorn popped! I'm so happy. And it's really tasty popcorn. Crisp and hull-less. Really nice flavor even without butter and salt. Super with them. I wish it was a open pollinated (OP) variety that breeds true so I could save the seeds to replant next year. But it's F1. Nevertheless, I'll buy this variety again next year. Pop!! We'll have it with our New Year's champagne!

parasitic wasps

My first shipment of corn worm parasitic wasps arrived 3 weeks ago. They need to go out to the field within 24 hours, so I ran over to the community gardens and distributed the four cards. Each card has pin head size wasp eggs glued to it. I searched through the plots and found about 10or 12 patches of corn. In four of them, I hung a card of eggs.

I am receiving more eggs about once a week and each time I place the cards in different patches.

The wasps parasitize the eggs of the European Corn Borer. Its an experiment to see if this helps with our worms. From looking back to my old photos (below), the worms I had two years ago were Corn Ear Worms, not Borers. My understanding is that the Ear Worm lays its eggs singly so its hard for a wasp to be effective against them because it has to find every egg. On the other hand the European Corn Borer lays eggs in a cluster, so the wasps can effectively parasitize all of them. It seem like a fantastic, organic method of pest control, so I am trying the experiment anyway.