Sweet CornMost years we plant about a half acre of sweet corn for our 4 families use. Usually we plant it within a field of field corn to help keep other critters (mostly racoons) from finding it when it matures. This year we planted no field corn so Lee decided to plow up a half acre place on the side hill for just the sweet corn and a bit of indian corn. As the corn was getting just about ready to pick, our corn patch suddenly became the prime hangout for almost every deer in the area. They were ruining all the corn that we had watched grow all summer! Mom suggested a fence and I did a quick search online and came up with a product called "Deer-Out". We quickly placed an order for 2.5 gallons of concentrate and had it in 2 days. I mixed up a batch in the 3-point hitch sprayer and drove around the field, spraying into the field as far as I could. The stuff really seemed to work! That evening I watched deer come out to the field and stop about 20 feet from the corn. They seemed highly offended and eventually turned around and left. Our sweet corn patch was saved!
The next week on Monday evening we picked over 800 ears of sweet corn -this was only about half the patch. The next morning we started husking, blanching, cutting, stuffing bags and freezing. By mid afternoon we had done 849 ears of corn and ended up with 137 quart freezer bags of corn which we divided between our families. |
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