Even Cornier...

Yeah, I know I just posted about growing corn. But, what happens when the corn you have grown is ready? Duh, you eat it! 

And here is my most favorite way to cook/eat it!

 After you pick it, just throw it in your oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

 When it is finished cooking, the corn looks a little crispy and brown around the edges.

 But as soon as you shuck it, it's ready to eat!

Nom, nom, nom...

This way also works great when putting up corn in the freezer! Just cut the cooking time down to 10 minutes, shuck the corn (which is soooo easy this way), and freeze! Easy peasy!

Warning: Corny Post Ahead!

No, seriously...it's all about corn!

This year, we got to plant about an acre of  Seminis Roundup Ready sweet corn, which was supplied to us by Monsanto (all opinions/photos are my own!). That means the corn can be sprayed with Roundup, which means there will be less weeds in the corn patch! (And if you know me, that means, less fear of seeing a snake! ha)



Of course, I leave the planting to the experts.



This is what the seed looks like going into the planter hopper.

We put four rows of it in our garden, the rest was planted in a small field behind our house.



Here's the corn after two weeks...



After one month...



After two months...



Reed's saying, "look the corn will be ready soon!". No, actually, Reed is saying, "take a picture of me eating this."

At this point, the ears have formed and are filling out on the stalk.  How does that happen, you ask? You were asking that, right?

 

When corn starts forming it's ears (usually one per stalk, sometimes two), it will start forming the cob inside the shuck.



The tassels (in above pic) form at the same time as the ears. This is the male part of the plant.



The pollen off the tassels fall onto the silks of the cob, which pollinates the corn kernels. Each silk has to be pollinated or a kernel won't form. After the kernels are pollinated, the silks go from a yellow color to a brown color. At this time, the corn can be checked to see if it is ready to eat. If this was field corn, it would still need to dry before combining.

 

 

Should be some good eating soon! And for the next decade, considering we planted an entire acre, haha.

Scenes from Harvest 2013

Since this year's harvest is winding down...I finally have time to post some pictures!

 

 We finished our corn harvest in September.

 

We started peanut harvest not long afterwards in October.

We started later than usual, which was close to our frost date (October 15th), so we decided to go ahead and invert (dig the peanuts up and flip them over) all the peanuts before we picked any.  

When the peanuts have had time to dry after being inverted, the frost doesn't hurt them, and they run through the combine just fine.

 We finished combining peanuts on October 24th.

 The same day we started picking cotton.

This was the cotton in our backyard.  

 I love taking pictures of this barn in our cotton. This year, I took it with an awesome setting on my phone, "dirty window." We have had a lot of folks come to take pictures in our cotton this year because it was so pretty. This barn is a popular spot.

Here, you can see the module truck starting to pick up some of our cotton modules in one of our fields. The module truck carries the modules to the cotton gin. We found out today that one of our modules was too big to fit on the truck. I just want to point out that it was not me that built it. "Ahem, Lance, cough cough".

 This was an odd sight in one of our fields. Lance parked his combine (which harvests grain) in our cotton field. We currently have around 150 acres of cotton left to harvest!

We are also harvesting soybeans.

When we have enough help in the cotton field, Lance sneaks off to the soybean field to pick a while.

It's a very slow go, but we're getting there!

 We were also videoed and interviewed for the "Outstanding Young Farm Family" contest we are currently competing in.

To read more about that, click here.

 

That's it for now! If you have any questions about what's happening in any of these pictures, check out my "Farming 101" page!



Corn Harvest 2013

The crazy weather we've had this year has thrown our harvest a little late, but we've finally gotten started! Here's some pictures from this year's corn harvest!

 

 These photos were taken in the smallest field behind our house.

 

 

 Of course, Reed spotted the combine and had to ride.

 

The neighbor's horses were hoping some corn would shoot their way. 

 And Wiggley was also enjoying the action.

 

 This is our truck and hopper bottom we load the corn in to.

 

Lance sent me this picture from the granary. He was about to unload our first trailer full of corn!

 

If you want to learn more about harvesting corn, here is a very detailed blog I did a few years ago!



A Good Stand of Corn

Today we went out and checked our corn fields. We started planting corn about 10 days ago. We only got around 100 acres planted before it set in to raining. We've gotten 9" in two weeks.

 With all that rain, we were worried about whether the corn seed had been washed away or drowned out.

 

 Thankfully, as you can see, we have a pretty good stand of corn. We do  have a few wet spots that didn't come up, and we'll have to replant a few rows up behind our house, but it could've been much worse!

 

 Here is our official corn spotter at work. "Where's it at Daddy?"

 

 "See the corn, Reed?"

 

 "There it is!"

 



And here's a dern armadillo hole also in one of our corn fields. Well, they're in every field. You don't want to hit one of those suckers with a tractor tire. Heck, I think we've lost an entire tractor in one before.

Corn Harvest 2012

We've been finished harvesting corn for almost a month now, so it's definitely time to share some pictures from Corn Harvest 2012!

We had a warm Spring this year, so we got to plant the corn in April, which is a little earlier than nomal. That means it was ready in August, also a little earlier than normal.

 



 This was Reed's first ride in a combine. He loved it! Well, he loves riding in all kinds of tractors!

 

We only had about 155 acres of corn this year, so it didn't take us very long to combine it. We only plant corn where cotton and peanuts do not grow very well.

 

 We had a dry spell during the summer, which really hurt our yields. We averaged  about 60 bushels per acre.  Some farms yielded more, some less.

 

The farms we rent have a lot of terraces (very hilly) and are spread out all over the place, so that keeps us from being able to irrigate, so we really depend on the rain. . A lot of corn farmers were affected by the drought this year.

 

 If you would like to learn more about corn harvest, check out this post from last year!

 

I snapped this picture of our neighbor harvesting his fields at the same time we were!

 

We're now disking up our corn ground and getting it ready to be planted in wheat!