Oh sweet Kandy Korn....

One of the things we always try to grow in the garden is sweet corn.  We've tried Merit, Peaches and Cream, Honey Select, but always seem to come back to Kandy Korn.

This year, I had "garden fever" pretty bad...maybe it pandemic burnout, or maybe it was the very uncharacteristic cold spell we had in February that brought sub-zero temperatures and left several inches of snow on the ground for about a week.  

Whatever, the reason, I could hardly wait to get started, but the weather didn't want to cooperate, so I had to wait until the ground was dry enough to break with the tiller to get started.  We finally got a short window of dry weather in late April, and although the dirt really was still a little too wet, with more rain in the forecast, I went ahead and tilled the garden and planted the corn, beans, peas and okra.

And rain it did.  I think in that next week we got over four inches of rain, and although the seeds started coming up, some must have rotted because there were gaps in the rows.  The little plants at the south end of the rows stood in water for several days.

While the things I had planted were weak and yellow, the clouds and soggy dirt doesn't seem to bother crab grass, Bermuda grass or the other assorted weeds that had survived the tiller.  (I actually think most of them survived...because it rained the very next day, I am pretty sure all I did was transplant them from their original spot to a new place in the row.)  By the time the corn was about two weeks old, the situation was starting to look pretty out of hand.  I took the hoe to it, working through one row every evening after work and  finally made it through all six rows except for the south end of the first two rows, which were still just too wet.  I tried transplanting some of the corn from where it needed to be thinned, moving it into gaps in the row.  Some made it, some didn't.  But after the grass was out of the rows, I felt a bit more hopeful.

Still, the corn just didn't grow like I thought it should.  It looked yellow and weak.  How on earth would such pitiful little plants ever make anything?  They need fertilizer, I thought.  I had bought a bag of  Urea (40-0-0) the year before, so with rain again in the forecast, I took an empty soup can, scooped up some of the granules and walked through the corn, sprinkling them around the plants. 

In a few days, I expected to see the corn plants start to "green up."  But some of them actually looked worse!  I know now that 40-0-0 is some pretty potent stuff, and shouldn't be applied so close to the plants.  I'm probably pretty lucky that I didn't just kill all of the plants with the mega-dose of nitrogen that I put down around them!

But in spite of the rain (and in spite of me), when the sunny days of mid-June arrived, the corn was growing and actually looked pretty good.  The stalks at the south end were still small, and I didn't think they'd ever make anything, but it looked like the rest of it was might make a few ears.

I knew  my younger sister had been having trouble with our neighbors' bull calves (two different neighbors, three calves).  Neither has a real fence for for their calves, and the calves kept breaking out of their pens and wandering through the community (and through her beautiful garden a few times!). 

 Fast-forward to June 22.  

One of the calves visited my corn patch that afternoon too...the tops of about a dozen plants were gone, and several were leaned over. 

All in all though, the damage was minimal though, and I was thankful they hadn't taken out all six rows!

June gave way to July, and the corn grew taller and first started to tassel, then started putting on ears.  Even the little plants that had been stunted by the bad soil, too much rain and a wayward calf had little ears.  The rain had completely stopped - we were officially in an Arkansas summer. Time to break out the watering pipe (a 10' stick of PVC with holes drilled in it) and give the corn a good soaking so the ears would fill out.

As the silks turned brown, we started checking the ears every day.  We didn't want the corn to get too mature (like it did last year).  We finally found four ears that we considered "ready" so we enjoyed our first fresh garden corn that night. There's nothing quite like the first fresh garden corn, IMHO!

BUT, the next morning when I took my little dog Mo around the yard, an ear of corn that we didn't pick was hanging down the stalk of a plant in the west row. 

The raccoons had found our corn patch. 

Now I suppose raccoons like their corn a certain way too, because the ear that was pulled down had only been nibbled on then discarded, and none of the other ears were touched.  But based on our experience from last year, I knew they'd be back.  And when they hit a small corn patch, they can ruin it in one night.  

What to do?

That evening, I asked The Google, "how to keep raccoons out of your corn."  There were lots of suggestions, ranging from the very expensive to the very cheap; from very humane, to very cruel.

One person suggested putting duct tape around the ears, so I thought I'd try that on a few of them.  RAF said I used way too much tape but I wanted to be sure they couldn't rip into the ear.   

I only had enough duct tape to wrap about three ears, and decided that this method wasn't really practical for a corn patch of any size.  Plus, it created a lot of waste that wasn't biodegradable and would just end up in the landfill.

What else might work?  

I had some chicken wire that had been used for my little chicken pen (taken down when the neighbor's dogs broke into the pen and killed my chickens 😭😭😭)  So I got the tin snips and cut some pieces about 1' wide and 24" long and tried wrapping that around a few of the ears.  I tried to be sure the cut ends stuck out on the side of the corn away from the stalk, because the cut wire really was quite prickly - I had the bloody spots on my hands and arms to prove it!

The next morning when I took Mo around the yard, I could tell the raccoon had been back. 

The ears wrapped in duct tape didn't appear to have been touched. 

But I could see where he had tried to rip into several of the ears wrapped in chicken wire. 

He was able to pull the  husks down, but interestingly, the kernels themselves didn't appear to have been touched.  Not sure why that is, but I decided the chicken wire would be worth using again, only maybe space it out a bit more from the ears.

Several of the ears that weren't wrapped with anything had the husks stripped off on one side, and the kernels were nibbled all the way down the ear.

But lucky for us, the raccoon must have gotten frustrated or frightened off, or maybe thought the ears he was able to get to weren't quite ready, so he left without doing too much damage.

But I wasn't going to give him another shot at my corn!

That evening, we harvested almost all of the corn, leaving only the ears that were still too small to eat.  It turned out that RAF was right about the duct tape, by the way, because I couldn't rip into the ear either and ended up having to get the scissors and cut the tape!

It was a decent harvest, and for the most part, the ears were beautiful and just right for eating!

I froze almost all of it on the cob, wrapping each ear individually in aluminum foil.  Although frozen is not as good as fresh, these will make some good eating this coming winter!