After weeks of rain and cold, we finally had the chance to harvest our popcorn for the year. From the sound of the weather report, we only have today and tomorrow and part of Wednesday before we are back to rain, cold and...........dare I say it?..............snow? This has been a very difficult harvest season not only for us, but for the area farmers trying to gather in the sugar beets, soybeans, edible beans, and corn. The fields are just swamps with standing water. Harold usually has been doing the sugar beet harvest for almost a week by now, but this year nobody has even started, as the fields are completely wet.
But we are enjoying our 2 or 3 days of sunshine! A couple weeks ago the big hailstorm we had damaged everything and shredded the popcorn stalks. But the ears seemed to survive and from the looks of the harvest we will have a good crop of popcorn this year.
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| The recent hailstorm shredded the corn stalks and beat down the plants. But the ears survived. |
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| Harold sits on the tongue of my little "zippy wagon" and shucks popcorn. We ended up with a pretty good crop in spite of the weather this summer. |
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| We both spent a couple hours in the fall sunshine shucking (or is it husking?) corn ears. |
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| We had a very full wagon load plus - of corn to shuck. |
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| The popcorn ears looks very good, nice and full! |
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| Harold is still happily shucking popcorn ears! |
When we have all the ears shucked, we put the ears into a large screened box with a warm fan blowing air into it. When the ears are dry enough, we put them through the corn sheller to strip the kernels off the ears, then dry the popcorn further in trays until it is ready to pop. Then we store the popcorn in wide mouth quart jars until we sell the popcorn at our market booth early this spring.
1 comment:
Oh shucks.. .your comment section changed again??
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