Corn!

I picked the first few ears of corn from the garden yesterday! I picked one that was definitely not ready, but the other three ears were nice and big. I was so excited to shuck them, it was like opening Christmas presents!





They turned out very nicely! Not a bug in sight!!





One ear looked like this on one end. It looks to me like those shrively kernels were never fertilized. Did you know that every silk on an ear of corn goes to one kernel? When the pollen falls off the tassels, it lands on the silks and that's what fertilizes the corn kernels. I'm guessing maybe this one didn't get fertilized good enough. Who knows!

The corn tasted pretty good, but it wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped. It was a little sticky. Does that mean I didn't cook it long enough?



David's friend Marc came over to help us lay out our sheep fence line. He is a surveyor, so he brought over his fancy equipment (I won't even tell you how much it was worth!!!) and marked out the points of the corners. He also layed out the fence line exactly on the property line on one side, so we could make sure not to cross it. It started raining, or else we could have layed out where every single post needed to go. He measure the perimeter and area, and it comes out to 1/3 of an acre. It's a little small for what I want to put in there, but with some intensive management it can probably work. I'm going to call the owner of the neighboring property and see if he'll lease the acre next to us. I'm crossing my fingers!



A few of the chickens came out to see what we were doing. David was reading an article in Countryside Magazine about chickens and selling eggs. He seemed pretty interested in it, so I mentioned that I'd like to get some more layers. He agreed! It's funny because I have been thinking that for a while, but I don't know that he would have agreed with me unless he read the article. I am going to go to a local livestock auction on Wednesday and see what they have. They usually have a pretty good number of chickens and other poultry there. It would be nice to finally have some eggs for us and to sell.