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| Indian Corn grown of seed from SeedForSecurity.com |
Quick update on the
Indian Corn we are growing in one of our gardens. As previously mentioned, this is our second season at trying to grow corn.
First season we planted too late. This season looks like a winner. Our first cob picked
revealed "kernal gap" was occuring in our garden. With the help of some readers here and Google searching, I learned how to hand pollinate. This is a picture of some ears we picked yesterday. Not very much kernal gap on these. What a relief!
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| Different batch, still in husks. |
I am
fascinated by the multi-colored kernals. Wifey cooked these ears and we had them with dinner. We had to learn the hard way how to cook it, of course. Some researching shows that you
cook the cobs very quickly in boiling water (some resources say just three to seven minutes in boiling water.) Believe it or not, the solid colored ears actually tasted more palatable than the multi-colored but they were a bit over-cooked. So, the next batch will be cooked perfectly.
I dried out an ear and hand pulled the kernals off for seed storage. They came of rather easily and I stored them in an amber pill bottle in the freezer (don't quote me on that one, I'm pretty sure I heard freezing is ok?)
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| PVC framed, bird netted, second season Indian corn. |
This gardening experiment took some fine tuning but we are now comfortable that in THIS climate, with THIS seed (
SeedForSecurity), and in THIS soil, we can grow a food that is delicious, nutritious, and fairly easy to grow (once you learn how, of course.) That remains our goal. Learn how to grow food that our family will eat and help reduce our dependence on grocery stores.
What's YOUR goal?
I didn't grow any corn either, for space reasons--my garden's really small. Also my husband, who grew up around here, says corn doesn't do well. But if you companion-plant it with a nitrogen-producer like beans or peas, I bet it would do fine here.
ReplyDeleteI also froze some seeds--seems like I read somewhere that that would be okay.
@Kris I froze some seeds the other day too. I used an amber colored old pill bottle. Rambling Anne recommends making sure they are super dried out before freezing. Something about crystals forming inside the seed if there is any moisture left.
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