Lend me an ear

​Gardening has been an interest of mine for over a decade now. I am fascinated by the whole process. The smallest of seeds carefully placed into the dirt, watered and given some sunshine and warmth, grow into beautiful flowers and amazing food and towering trees. It’s a little impossible to believe, really. Sometimes there is no earthly reason for things to grow where they grow and survive when they should shrivel up and disappear, but they do.
​I garden in Illinois—West Central Illinois, to be precise, and if you google “Illinois Farming,” what you will see is image after image of robust corn fields. Corn. True, it’s mostly seed corn, but anecdotal evidence from my Facebook feed will tell you that there is a lot of sweet corn to be had as well. I have been growing sweet corn in my garden every year that I have put my hands into the pungent black dirt and dug holes, sowed seeds, weeded, and watered. I talk to my plants, check on them after storms, and shelter them when it’s cold. I start seeds inside; I wait until it’s warmer to plant them directly. I buy seeds at Wal-Mart and order them from catalogs. I am a “trial and error” gardener. I’ve had a lot of success, and a phenomenal amount of sweet corn failure.
​I have never eaten a single kernel of sweet corn that has been produced by me, in my garden, with my own two hands. I have grown truckloads of green cornstalks, and I can dry those out and do fall decorating like no other. It’s not something I talk about often. After all, what Illinois gardener wants to admit that they can’t grow corn in the same dirt that produces millions of bushels of it every year? Not this gardener. So when I’m discussing gardens with friends and co-workers and the topic moves to sweet corn, I laugh and play along like I know exactly what it feels like to have buckets and buckets of sweet corn and have to beg friends and family members and neighbors and strangers at the gas station to take some of it off my hands. Then later I get in my car and drive to the grocery store to buy my sweet corn in secret because I can’t take sweet corn from the more fortunate. They’d never look at me the same way again.
​Suffering quietly, studying intently, and surreptitiously harvesting advice have been core elements of my sweet corn aspirations. While my approach to growing sweet corn has changed, been adjusted, and evolved, so has the Universe’s defense against my efforts. My inaugural growing season was the year 2000. I had recently moved into a house with a yard. There was an established grapevine and a small garden plot. My great grandmother was such a successful gardener that she kept herself and two children alive and well fed during The Depression, so I assumed that with all the cultivation advances at my disposal I could grow a small garden and have some fresh vegetables. I very carefully planned the location of each item according the amount of sun and shade and how it would relate to the plants next to it.
At the beginning, all was well. The carrots were thriving, the corn stalks were growing, the tomatoes were bushy, the broccoli was a delightful mint green, and nothing was picking a fight with or getting tangled up with the neighboring grapevine. By the Fourth of July, the corn stalks were up to my thigh, and everyone knows that “knee high by the Fourth of July” is the Old Wives’ measuring stick you use when growing corn, so I felt pretty good. Then I began to see ears take shape. The tassels appeared, silk peeking from the ears, and I began to get impatient. I checked in the morning and the evening. The ears didn’t seem to be getting bigger, let alone anywhere close to the size I would have expected. My friends were grilling their corn, boiling their corn, and one person had so much they were giving away truckloads. Finally one day I could take no more. I ran down to the garden and breathlessly peeled the husks down and gazed in amazement at the ear of corn I had just ripped from its stalk. There, in my hand, was a delicate ear of corn approximately three inches long and without one kernel. It looked as though it should have had kernels—I remember seeing little pockets, just waiting to house succulent golden and white kernels of corn—and yet it was barren, empty. Surely this was a fluke stalk. I checked another and then another, and as the pile of violated corn stalks grew, my hopes dwindled. With a heavy sigh, I looked around at the destruction and vowed to do some more research.
​Several years passed and while my gardens grew and flourished, my sweet corn never did. Most of the seasons were just like the first. Ears, but no corn. Then, in 2006, we moved. We moved to a humongous house with a large yard that had beautiful dirt. The first time I thrust my hand trowel into the dirt to make a place for the mums I had rescued from our old house, my heart leapt with glee at the possibilities. I managed to get substantial flower beds going that first season, but devoting time to vegetables was too much to put on my plate so I planned and schemed and hatched plans for my future gardens.
​March 2007. I marked out my vegetable garden and it was about three times the size of my previous vegetable gardens. I planned to grow all of my basics and throw in lettuce and cauliflower and pumpkins just because I could. At night I had dreams of shelves of homegrown vegetables canned and glistening in my pantry. I looked up salsa recipes because I was going to have a lot of surplus. My dining room turned into a grow room. I hand painted markers for the garden. It was in doing this project that my husband intervened. “Do you think devoting that amount of space to corn is a good idea?”
I looked up from the wooden stake that I was painting to look like an ear of corn, “What do you mean? I grow corn every year.”
“I know that you plant corn seeds every year, and make plans for all the corn you’re going to grow. But you’ve never managed to get any corn. Maybe you should devote that space to something else you can grow. Like beans, maybe? You’re really good at growing beans.” At this point he began backing out of the room.
“I think the only reason I couldn’t grow corn is that the grapevine was draining the soil of all that is good and healthy. This is new dirt, a new garden, and no grapevine. You’ll see. I’m going to grow so much corn you’ll be astounded and have to ask forgiveness. No. Grovel for forgiveness if you’re going to eat anything from MY garden.” These words I shouted at the back of the man who’d spent the entire previous weekend tilling the garden to my specifications, and then going back out to do it again because I thought the dirt looked too clumpy.
​And so the garden proceeded. Admittedly, the pumpkins got completely out of hand, gleefully climbing the chain link fence that I was sure would serve as adequate trellis, and began happily growing near the neighbor’s compost heap. The beans flourished, the lettuce was abundant, I had so many tomatoes I was forcing them on anyone who came to the house, and the corn looked great. It was greener than I remembered from the old garden, taller than I remembered, and the ears looked to be the size I expected. Then the corn watching began.
​I had never had this problem before. There were never ears of corn to be harvested before. After that first year, it was easier and easier to spot the looming failure. But this time I had done it. There were going to be piles of fresh sweet corn in my kitchen, on my plates, and in the bellies of my children, that I had grown. I was bursting with pride. I picked a day and decided that I would pick some corn and we would cook out and I could smugly watch the naysayer I married eat crow/corn.
​I put on my rubber gardening clogs. I picked up the big sturdy basket. I marched confidently to the garden. I stood in front of the corn. I took a deep breath and reached out and snapped off the first ear, peeled down the husk, and found myself holding a swarming mass of wormy bugs that were energized by the exposure to sunlight and freedom. Having gotten hopped up on the golden deliciousness of my sweet corn, they were now more than ready to explore their world. When they began swarming over my gloved hand, I shrieked and threw off my gloves, running toward the house flailing my appendages about like a cat trying to avoid a bath. As I slammed the door behind me, my daughter asked, “Mommy, do we have to go buy corn for dinner?”
​I have had seven growing seasons since that first one at this house, and my luck with corn is still the same. In addition the lack of kernels and the bugs, I have also lost the stalks to windstorms and hail storms. Raccoons and deer enjoy munching on the plants and are unperturbed by the human hair I use to decorate the garden or the fences I put up to keep them out. I have tried pollinating the plants myself thinking that the birds and bees weren’t getting the job done. I did discover that green beans enjoy using corn stalks as trellises, and that the said corn stalks are pretty darn sturdy in their role as trellis. I have come to appreciate the quiet beauty that growing corn stalks add to a garden. I guess it’s good that I find that enjoyable, as the darn things don’t really give me anything else.
​So here I am, planning my 2015 garden. Last year I participated in a community garden where I work. I helped with every part of the garden and when they decided to plant sweet corn, I explained to everyone about my sweet corn curse and that I probably shouldn’t work in that section of the garden. My co-workers were kind and understanding, but I worried about the backlash if we failed to harvest any corn. I kept my contact with the seeds and plants to a minimum and it not only grew, but produced ears of corn that were edible and had no bugs and people took home and cooked. It was a beautiful thing. So I am once again including sweet corn in my garden plan. At least if I can’t grow it at home, I can wait for a co-worker to pick some and put it on the break room table.
​I do wonder if I should abandon my efforts. I grow everything else well. I enjoy it. I could use that space to grow more of what I can grow. But every time I find myself hovering over my garden blueprint with the eraser, prepared to wipe the word “corn” from my plan, I hear myself say to my dance daughter, to my gymnast daughter, to my son trying to pedal his tricycle: “You don’t quit trying just because you can’t do it right now. You keep at it until you figure out what isn’t working, and find something that does work.” And so corn stays on the blueprint and I keep trying.