A Worm Guaranteed in Every Ear

A local farmer was selling corn from the back of his truck yesterday, so we stopped to check them out.  When I asked how much, the farmer said, “Three dollars a dozen ma’am and there’s a worm guaranteed in every ear.  We don’t use any sprays on the corn we grow.”

I asked for 6 dozen.

Once he’d gotten those counted out there were only about 4 to 5 dozen left in the bed of his truck.  Mr. Farmer said… “Take the rest and I’ll call it 9 dozen in all.”

I took the rest.

He and his wife were most pleased to be able to go home early and get out of the heat.  And I was just as pleased to come home with locally grown, organic corn.

This is what 9+ dozen corn looks like (Dave had already shucked one bag before I thought to take a picture:

Here are 4 dozen blanched, drained and in the process of being bagged before being popped into the deep freeze.

This year, we decided to make 12 bags of three and 12 bags of one to give us options depending how many are home for supper.  If we need more than one package of three but less than 2 packages, we can open a single.

We used a Foodsaver Vacuum Sealer but I can’t honestly give it a good recommendation.  We’ve only had this vacuum sealer for a little over a year.  It seals fine when all we’re doing is dry stuff like when I make up packages of dehydrated vegetables or packages of mixed dried bean soup.

But any time we’ve tried to seal bags where the contents have even the least little bit of moisture, we have trouble getting the bags to seal properly.   Yesterday, Dave ended up having to put the bags through at least twice, sometimes three times before he got a good seal.  And the unit overheats and needs to be allowed to cool down after only a few seals… so bagging the corn actually took longer than the blanching did.

We spent the evening shucking, washing and then cutting kernels off the rest of the cobs to can whole kernel corn.  That took an hour or so longer than we expected and it was 11 o’clock before we got our first canner load of raw packed corn started.  It takes 55 minutes to pressure can pints of corn not including the venting time, bringing it up to pressure and then back down to zero pressure after the 55 minutes are up.

There was no way I was going to start another canner load at 2 am so the rest of the kernel corn was put in the fridge overnight and we hot pack canned it this afternoon.  For some reason, we had three jars that didn’t seal last night and so we reprocessed those at the same time.  (This is very unusual for us, we usually have 100% sealage.)

In case you’re wondering why I raw packed the corn last night and chose to hot pack it this afternoon… after spending a night in the fridge the corn was really cold and to then pour boiling water over the cold corn in jars, we could have had problems with jar breakage due to thermal shock.   Hot packing the corn into hot jars eliminated that risk.

Note:  A really great resource for how to can corn plus many other vegetables and fruits is pickyourown.org:

How to raw pack corn:  http://www.pickyourown.org/howtocancornrawpack.htm

How to hot pack corn:  http://www.pickyourown.org/howtocancorn.htm

There are lots of other resources available on-line, but be careful that whatever resource you use practices modern safe canning procedures and when pressure canning it is wise to always check any on-line resource against the instructions provided in your owner’s manual to make sure to have the correct canning times.

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