2025 Sweet Corn Harvest

We planted two rows of sweet corn this year.  We usually plant a couple of heirloom varieties - Country Gentleman and Stowell's Evergreen.  They aren't prolific producers (only one to two ears per stalk), they grow very tall and tend to blow over in the wind and rain, but they are non-GMO and are sweet.  I gathered my clippers and a laundry basket and decided I would go ahead and harvest in the morning before it got too hot.  It didn't matter.  It was hot and muggy and my shirt was soaked through and through almost before I got started.

I watched as a four foot long king snake slithered into the garden, unfazed by my presence, and nestled into the snap beans.  He knew I wouldn't do anything to him.  He's a "good" snake.  Still, if I was picking beans and didn't know he was there, he'd give me quite a start, for sure.

The way I judge if the corn is ready to harvest is by looking at the silk.  If it has turned brown, like you see below, it's ready to pick.

If it still has a red-color to it like you see below, I leave it to mature for a couple or 3 days.  Of the two rows, I left about 15 stalks standing that I'll go back and pick in a day or two.

The cows (in this case, Nick, the bull, takes great interest in the corn harvest as they eat the leaves and stalk of the corn plant.

In the end, we got a laundry basket full of sweet corn.  Not a tremendous harvest, but not terrible, either.

Aw shucks!  I began shucking the corn, removing the husks and silk.  Here is an ear of the Country Gentleman variety.  You'll notice that this variety is different in that the corn kernels are not arranged in uniform rows on the ear.  They're just haphazardly on the ear.

Here is an ear of the Stowell's Evergreen Corn.

We had a lot of damage this year from worms.  Most every ear had damage on the ends that I had to cut off.

After cleaning it all up, I took it inside where Tricia blanched it on the cob.  Once cooled, I cut the kernels off the cob and scraped the "milk" from the cob into a big stainless steel bowl.

We began bagging it all up in quart-sized zip loc bags.  We'll eat all this up later.  Our two favorite recipes to make are Mexican Street Corn and Corn Macque Choux.

Now that most of the corn is out of the way, I think I'll get some purple hull peas planted and maybe some pumpkins.