This is happening right now:
And I wish I was there.
Sweet Corn Season. It’s a capital-letter-phrase in our household, and it’s an experience that I’ve been looking forward to sharing all year. Let me tell you the story.
When I turned 12, my parents bought me a cheap, above-ground pool for my birthday to replace the old stock tanks we used to swim in (hastag farmlife, am I right?). It came with a catch (of course): my brother and I were going to help pick and sell sweet corn the following summer to pay for it.
And thus was born the annual Sweet Corn project.
My dad planted a patch of sweet corn every year in the middle of one of the regular corn fields.
Keep in mind that field corn and sweet corn are two completely different things. Field corn is one of the major cash crops of America; it’s what’s growing when you see the acres of corn when you drive through the Midwest. It grows to complete maturity, when the kernels are dry and hard, and the grain is used to feed cattle, sweeten our sodas, and make corn tortillas (and everything in between).
Sweet corn is the kind of corn you eat off the cob. Depending on the quality, it’s so sweet and tender that you’ll forget to put butter on it. Sweet corn is sweet and hardly starchy. I’m not really sure what kind of corn they pack cans with in the store – it doesn’t resemble fresh sweet corn at all.
We at buckets of sweet corn during Sweet Corn Season.
The day went like this:
Wake up, stumble out of bed and grab a bite to eat. Throw on a corn shirt (i.e. an old button-down shirt to protect your arms from being sliced by the thin corn leaves) and load up the pick-up by 7:00 am. There is no such thing as cool in Kansas in July, but in order to survive, we had to be done picking by 8:00 am.
My brother, Ray, and I usually rode in the back of the pick-up, holding the 5-gallon buckets we used to haul the corn from the field to the pick-up.