What the Holy Heck is Going on With Local Corn?
Hot on the heels of my recent article about Kallstrom Sweet Corn, I run into this debacle! We never did buy corn in Moses Lake because Kallstrom doesn't sell on the weekends, and we found some at Country Mercantile in Pasco. Of course, we peeled back the first couple of inches to see if the corn looked any good! Well, we didn't peel back far enough I guess. We bought a bag of 1 dozen ears, and every single one of them looked like this. Well, one of them didn't, but the colonels were unusually small and not flavorful at all. Believe it or not, we ate the corn in the photo above, and it was pretty good! If you can get past the looks of it all. I don't think the folks at Country Mercantile realize that some of their corn looks like this, or they wouldn't even sell it. Maybe I just got a bad bag, I don't know, but I Googled information on hot weather versus corn. I was thinking maybe those insanely hot temperatures we had may have messed up the crop. I found that corn is happy in warm weather ranging from 59 to 95 degrees. I guess corn does not like 116-118 degrees like we had. So far this summer we've had tremendous success finding excellent watermelons and cantaloupe, but we're striking out on corn (the first purchase was grocery store corn from Califonia). The mission will continue and remember to pull the husk back a little farther than I did!