Corn From Farm to Fork

Welcome to my page all about corn! Here you will find information taking you from the farm all the way to your fork. This will include tried and true recipes, planting, growing, harvesting, and preserving tips for all things corny.

Quick Links to Topics on this Page:

• Favorite Corn Recipes
• Planting Corn
• Maintaining a Healthy Corn Crop
• Harvesting Corn
• Preserving Corn

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The best part of raising your own farm-fresh corn is the mouth-watering taste. So let’s start with my favorite ways to prepare fresh corn.

Favorite Corn Recipes

We love eating our fresh corn right off the cob the best, but also enjoy the few recipes that follow. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to share your favorite corn recipes with me!

Planting Corn

If this is your first garden consider reading Gardening 101 to get off to a good start. We plant corn seeds straight in the ground typically in rows in an area that gets full sun. They grow well in the warm season and should be planted after the threat of frost has passed.

Maintaining a Healthy Corn Crop

Corn requires frequent watering on the order of 1 inches per week. If the stalks do not get enough water they produce ears with lots of missing kernels. Keeping the weeds down will also promote growth and not choke the new plants out. Keep the plants watered and weeded and they will produce a delicious corn crop.

Harvesting Corn

When corn is ready to harvest the silk turns brown, but the husk stays green. Mature corn ears are simply broken off the stalks. The corn stalks will not continue to produce corn but are sometimes used in fall decor. I’ll be honest corn is always one of those crops that we debate on growing. It takes up so much space and needs so much water and does not continue to produce after it grows only a couple of cobs per stalk.

Preserving Corn

There are more than a few methods to enjoy corn all year long, or really to not have to eat all the corn you harvested at one time.

If you have a pressure canner you can choose from a hot or raw pack method of canning. Or this Pickled Corn Relish Recipe can be canned with a water bath canner.

We typically prepare it for the freezer with the following steps below.

Freezing Corn

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Ingredients

• fresh corn on the cob

Instructions

1. Start by husking the corn making sure to get all the silk. If there are any bad parts they need to be cut off.
2. Blanch the corn by dropping the corn in a large pot of water, making sure the cobs are fully submerged for 9 minutes. (If the cobs are small in diameter you can lower the time to 7 minutes or large in diameter increase the time to 10 minutes.) Then use tongs to remove the cobs and drop in a bucket of ice water until completely cool.
3. Next use a corn cutter to cut the kernels off the cob. The corn cutter will sit on top of a bowl or 9x13 pan and cut the kernels off the cob as you slide it up the tool. You can adjust the blade to get the desired cut.
4. Scrape each cob with a knife at about a 45° angle to get all the little bits of corn off the cob. Mix these bits with the cut corn.
5. Fill a ziploc bag with desired amount of corn. We line a ziploc bag inside a cool whip container, fill it with corn, zip tightly to get all the air we can out and then it's ready for your freezer.
6. To serve corn we defrost the corn in the microwave or in the oven in a glass 9x13 pan. Enjoy!

Here’s a link to the corn cutter that we use, works great and makes easy work of cutting corn off the cob.

Blog Posts about Hobby Farming

Check out the blog for more information about what’s new at Barton Craft & Barn including the following post about our hobby farming experiences.

Just Getting Started Gardening?

I put together a list of my top garden tools to help the newbie get the needed gardening essentials. If you are getting started gardening, or want to be more prepared this season, check out the printable in my free resource library for my favorite garden tools to get your gardening on. Hope you enjoy!