Harvesting and Drying Corn

I’ve been tardy with the follow up to my post about growing painted mountain corn – sorry!

First, a few thoughts about growing corn:

• I planted the rows a bit too close together. This made it hard to weed between the rows, and I think the weeds competed for water and held the corn back a bit. Doing this again I’d make every second or third row wide enough to comfortably walk between so that I could reach in and weed. I think this would increase yield quite a lot.
• Similarly we had a heat wave while the cobs were growing and I think the soil dried out a bit. It seems like corn really likes water, so it’s worth making sure you have a good sprinkler setup.
• I picked the corn when the beards were starting to look dry. I shucked it and laid the cobs out to dry on a cloth in the garage. After about a week the kernels felt quite hard. It was fairly easy at that point to detach the kernels from the cobs. What worked best was to remove one kernel, then work along in rows by pushing the next kernel down into the empty space with fingertips. I understand that you can also get devices designed to do this, like a metal ring that you grip in your hand, but I didn’t find it necessary.
• The final yield was about 2kg/4lb of dried corn from a 2×4 meter patch.

But now the interesting part – the pictures! I was really stunned how lovely this corn looks. It is easily the most impressive thing I have grown. Some ears were deep ruby red through to black,  some were speckled with flecks of red, orange and yellow, some had random blue and white kernels. My favourite were the pale yellow, blue and white ones with a pearl-like sheen.