The storm and the corn

Let me preface this post by saying that my garden is a hobby, not a livelihood.  Unlike some people in different parts of the country and world, we do not need our garden produce to survive.  We can always go to a grocery store or farmer's market and find plenty of delicious, fresh, nutritious food.

With that said, my garden is my hobby.  Every year, I am privileged to participate in the growing process of a variety of plants.  I lovingly prepare the soil in the spring, anxiously await the first green shoots, and then wait patiently for the plants to mature.

An experienced gardener learns when it is best to intervene and when it is more helpful to sit back and let a plant fight through a struggle on its own; sometimes the intervention can cause more damage than good.  With my garden, I work to provide support as necessary; I can be found picking off beetles, bugs, and worms whenever the need arises and I have the opportunity; and I rejoice the ripe fruits and vegetables when they arrive.

In my last post, I said that our corn was doing great.  It was, until Sunday night.  When the weather radio went off at 3:30 a.m., my first thoughts traveled to the young boy from our church who was supposed to be camping with his boy scout troop.  Everyone on the trip is safe, but they were a bit wet and tired when they got home.  When I heard the wind gusts start around 4:15 a.m., however, my thoughts went to my corn plants.  Without having to wait until morning to see, I knew they had blown over.

For those who don't have the same experience with plants as I do, here is a brief tutorial on corn.  Corn is one of a few plants that do not require insects for the fertilization process.  With corn, the pollen falls from the tassels onto the silks which are at the top of the ears of corn.  The necessary parts then travel down the silks to where each and every kernel is formed on an ear.  Because the plant requires gravity or wind for fertilization, the upright stature of corn plants is very important.  If the pollen can't fall onto the silks, no ears of corn will develop.

When I saw my corn lying flat on the ground in the morning, I grieved, not as long or as deeply as I have grieved in the past, but I certainly was upset about the loss of our hoped for corn crop.  After last year's fiasco with planting half of our corn rows with a variety that tasted like field corn, I was really looking forward to the joys of fresh sweet corn.

But, weather happens.  And in this case, the damage to the corn also affected some of the plants around it.  A few rows were lying on top of my freshly planted fall broccoli plants, while a few other rows were toppled over on top of my potato plants.

When we got up in the morning and realized the extent of the damage (all of the corn plants were literally lying flat on the ground, while nothing else in the garden or yard seemed to be touched), I tried my best to "walk the plants back up."  Unfortunately, though, some of the anchoring roots seemed to be damaged beyond repair.

Still, I kept trying with row after row.  I have learned over the course of the last few years that if there is any hope, I will keep going.  I couldn't give up on the corn because maybe, just maybe, I would be able to give it the support it needed in order to thrive.  Maybe I could provide it with just the right amount of help at just the right time.  Maybe the roots were deep enough and strong enough to weather this particular storm.


Over the course of the day, it seemed to be more and more apparent that most of the corn was probably a lost cause.  The slightest breeze would knock the plants to one side or the other.  We toyed with the idea of working harder to salvage the plants by staking and tying up every single one, but that would take a lot of time and supplies.  And, seriously, they are corn plants.  If the worst were to happen and the crop was a complete lost, we could just buy a few bushels of fresh sweet corn from someone nearby and freeze it.

So I did what I could, but life is busy and I only had a limited amount of time to work that morning.  The week was another full one so I didn't have much of a chance to look closely at the corn except for maybe once a day.  Life's busy distractions sometimes force me to be patient with certain matters.

But each time I saw the corn over the course of the week, it looked like it was recovering more and more, reaching for the sky.  As of Saturday, most of the corn had, miraculously, stood upright once again ... just in time for the tassels to appear.  The internal drive for living things to not only survive, but thrive, never ceases to amaze me.

Our corn crop will probably not be quite what it would have been had we not had this particular storm.  Another storm may still come and not it all down again, at an even more inopportune time.  But for now, the corn is doing fairly well again, even if the stalks are a bit crooked at the base.

The connection to and illustration of Anna's life was not lost on me this past week.