Three Sisters Garden

We planted a Three Sisters Garden this year: corn, beans and squash. Corn consumes a very high quantity of nitrogen and wears out soil quickly. Without corn’s sisters, corn must be rotated every year to give soil a rest. With the sisters, corn supposedly can be planted in the same plot year after year.

We only have one place where we can plant corn. Last year we tried another plot with poor results. The only way we’ll have sweet corn yearly is if the Three Sisters do their job.

Beans pull nitrogen from the air into their roots, providing nutrition for the next year’s crop. Beans climb the cornstalks and stabilize them against wind. This is a big plus in our windy climate.

I wanted to plant purple beans this year because I find green beans on green plants somewhat hard to see. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find purple pole beans. When I typed “purple pole beans” into Google just now, several links appeared. I’ll be buying online next year!

Once my plants came up, I heavily mulched them with newspaper and grass to suppress weeds and fertilize the ground. Grass is very rich with nitrogen.

Once the corn canopies, little further tending is necessary.

Squash runs underneath the corn, providing living mulch. Shade from both corn and squash squelches weeds and preserves soil moisture. Squash vines are covered with spines, discouraging hungry creatures from eating their fruit and their sisters’ fruit. We planted butternut squash this year. I hope to make pie filling from it because I can’t stomach winter squash on its own. But butternut pie tastes better than pumpkin and I adore pumpkin pie.

Three Sisters combination produces lots of leftover plant material at end of season. Just as I do with all garden “trash”, I leave it on the ground until spring. Cornstalks and vines make wonderful snow traps.

Unfortunately, they don’t get along with our tiller. Cornstalks are too thick for it to chop and the vines get entangled in the tines. I burn them in our fire pit come spring.

When our fire pit is filled with ashes, we spread them on our garden, adding potash to the soil. Have I told you that the Frugal Gardener hates waste?

I can hardly wait for that sweet corn. Yum, yum!

Reality check: FICA and FUTA

Grandma’s collage of their cornfield south of their house. I did not detassel here. My grandparents would not have appreciated the gesture.

No one detassels for fun. Well, maybe the crew leaders do, but not the worker bees. (I didn’t stick around long enough to be a crew leader.) The only incentive is pay, which came as a lump sum at season’s end.

I was so excited when my first paycheck came in the mail. I was primed to shop for school clothes.

Then I saw the big chunk Uncle Sam had bitten out of my check. I was shocked at the size of my tax bill. Then I comforted myself by saying, “Oh, well, I’ll get it all back when I file my tax return.”

Mother said, “See those lines for FICA and FUTA? You won’t get those back. FICA is Social Security, which you won’t see until you’re 65.”

At 14, 65 seems forever away. (And now I must reach 67 before I qualify — if Social Security still exists!)

“What does FUTA mean?” I asked.

“That’s unemployment insurance. You don’t qualify for it, either.”

Welcome to the real world.

Lost in the long corn rows

I have no sense of direction. None. Zippo. Zilch. Most of the time, this handicap is no big deal, but at times my lack has caused me major difficulties.

Detasselers work in whatever conditions Mother Nature dishes out, except lightning storms. Standing in a cornfield during lightning makes a person into a target.

Toward the end of one brutally hot and humid day, a thunderstorm brewed up. Boss decided that we’d best quit for the day. Crew leader told me to “dig out” those who weren’t finished with their rows and tell them that we were leaving. I did this, then walked toward the bus.

Except that I ended up on another side of the cornfield. Helplessly, I watched the bus pull away without me. Eventually, they realized that I had been left. They drove around looking for me, but I could never catch up to the bus.

We were about 15 miles from home and cell phones were not available yet. I walked at least a mile to the nearest farmhouse and called my mother.

Mother had a compass in her head. She could not understand how I could have gotten turned around in a cornfield.

But her confusion was nothing to the scorn I received from my crew mates. They all gave me dirty looks the next day. “How could you get lost in a cornfield?” they asked. And they kept on scornfully asking that question throughout whatever remained of the season.

Even years later, I still heard those taunts. Yes, this was definitely my most embarrassing moment.

Children of the corn

Putting a group of relatively unsupervised teenagers in a cornfield will lead to pranks and hijinks. Guaranteed.

Irrigation gate

The worst prank I know of was perpetuated by another crew. “Prank” is not strong enough. Their case was sheer vandalism. They were angry at the farmer for irrigating the night before they showed up to detassel. This farmer had gated irrigation. They reopened every one of his gates, then left. No one noticed what they had done until much later. By that time, the field was badly flooded.

That crew and its leader were summarily and deservedly fired. We hated them. Our crew had to go in afterward and detassel in very deep mud. Most of us gave up on our shoes and went barefoot. The mud sucked off our shoes at every step. We should have received extra pay for working this field, but of course we didn’t.

Hybrid corn must also be purged of volunteer corn plants or “rogues”. This process is called “roguing”. A roguer walks through the rows with a rogue knife, a kind of sharpened hook on a long pole. She cuts down or digs up the offending plant. Volunteers are generally cut before the corn reaches the tasseling stage. Volunteers get an earlier start so are taller than the surrounding hybrid plants. In this case, it is definitely beneficial not to stand out in a crowd.

The male rows were sometimes rogued later.

While we were detasseling, an all-female crew came to rogue the male corn rows. One was foolish enough to take off her shirt. One male crew member, well known for his pranks and his roaming hands, was assigned to detassel the row next to hers. He jumped out and grabbed her. She screamed, of course, and nearly fainted from fear. Other crew members pulled him away before anything else could happen. He was fired on the spot and banned from detasseling on any other crew.

A favorite prank was to come behind and to the side of another detasseler and push them over while shouting “Corn bore!” Caught off guard, the victim would go crashing into several corn rows, knocking down corn stalks.

Another one was less destructive. The perpetrator would collect tassels as he went along, then would bomb the victim with them.

Tempers often ran high in the heat, humidity and misery, leading to fights. Most of them weren’t serious (who had the energy?), but I remember one that ended in a broken nose. Both fighters were fired.

Teenagers thrown together will also “fall in love.”

Some hothouse romances sprung up, but wise crew leaders kept the “puppy lovers” from working adjacent rows. Crew members making out instead of pulling tassels were not very productive.

I never could understand how anyone could have energy for romance, but some people did. For me, as well as most detasselers, detasseling season was about survival, not romance.

We were the “children of the corn”.

Walking the long corn rows

When the corn starts to tassel, and the smell of corn pollen fills the air, my memory returns to my days as a detasseler.

A fellow blogger calls detasseling “the worst job I ever had.”

I completely concur. I hated every second of the two summers I pulled tassels. Pulling tassels was a gigantic hassle! Detasseling is a hot, miserable experience, but it’s a rite of passage for teenagers growing up in corn country. Even though it’s a nasty job, teenagers line up each summer to do it. Why? For the money. Detasseling is the best money available to teens under 16.

What is detasseling?

Seed companies need to force corn to cross-pollinate in order to produce hybrid seed corn. Corn generally self-pollinates. Pollen falls off the tassel onto the ear’s silk. Therefore, the tassel must be removed to prevent self-pollination. When I walked the rows, farmers planted 10(?) rows of female corn to two rows of male corn. The female corn was deeper green, bigger and stronger than the male corn. We pulled tassels out of the female corn and left the male corn alone. Standards were exacting. Only two female corn tassels per mile-square field could be left in the field. If more were left, the crew would have to go back into the field and redo it. Or, worse humiliation, the seed corn company would have another crew redo the job.

What was the experience like?

I got up at 4:30 each morning. Mother fixed me a good breakfast, then took me to the biology teacher’s house to meet the bus. He ran a detasseling crew as his summer job. We all wore the oldest clothes we possessed. Dawn usually broke just before we arrived at the field. Corn was wet with dew that early in the morning.

We each brought a black garbage bag and ripped holes for our heads and arms. We wore them to keep somewhat dry. Note the “somewhat”. Keeping completely dry was impossible. Once wearing the bags became intolerable, we ripped them off and discarded them in the field.

The damp or downright wet leaves cut anyone who did not wear gloves. I could never wear gloves since I lost the touch necessary to pull the tassels. By season’s end, I generally had a enough band-aids on my hands to make a glove.

Under the black garbage bag, we wore pants, long-sleeved shirt, T-shirt and a cap or hat. The long-sleeved shirt was discarded early because of the heat, but it did protect against cuts and rashes. I once wore a tank top for a couple days. I was so badly sunburned on top of my shoulders that I had scars for years. I’ve not been fond of tank tops ever since. Those who didn’t wear head coverings were more likely to get sunstroke.

We wore sturdy shoes, but we didn’t want to pay too much for them. They would be ruined by — or even before — season’s end.

Corn sheds pollen from about 9-11 a.m. and we’d be covered with it. Most of us got a rash from the pollen and from corn scratches.

We were one of the last seasons before the advent of detasseling machines, so we walked every bit of every row, pulling every tassel.

Steam starts to rise from the fields around 10 and the temperature is downright hot by 11. Heat worsened throughout the afternoon. We generally knocked off around 2 or 3 and were completely exhausted by then.

Corn was often over our heads. Yes, that canopy provided shade, but it also prevented any cooling breezes, making the air stuffy and detasseler drowsy. However, some corn would be below our knees. A detasseler had to look both overhead at the canopy and down to take care of each corn plant. And each row contains a lot of corn plants, 3,000 to 4,000 in a half-mile row. Some of those fields are a mile long.

Fields were often muddy, sometimes so muddy that we lost our shoes in the muck. Mud slowed you down and that was a bad thing. At least on our crew, everyone would be assigned a row at the same time. Those who finished early got to rest more than those who finished later. After finishing the row, we got to sit on the ground or whatever place we could find, get a drink and maybe eat a snack.

Mud generally came from irrigation. My first year, we drank from the irrigation gates, wonderful, refreshing cold water. Drinking from the gates was some compensation for the exhausting task of trudging through that mud. Water bottles are far away in the middle of a field. But in my second year, chemigation started. The farmer would add fertilizer, herbicide and/or insecticide to the water, making it unsafe to drink.

Listening to water that we couldn’t drink was aggravating.

The worst field I remember was a mile long. Its terrain was V-shaped. The further we got into the V, the hotter and stuffier it became. By the time we were at V’s bottom, the heat and humidity in the cornfield was stifling. Every time I descended deep into the V, I felt as if I could not breathe.

When I got home, I had to go to the back door where Mother would spray me down before entering the house. After I showered, I’d take a nap. She’d wake me for supper, then I’d go straight back to bed.

Season lasted for about 20 days. Twenty days of hell.

Detasseling supposedly built character. I suppose that’s true. Knowing the misery I’d face yet still going to work daily was good life training. But I don’t want to do it again!

Spectacular Frozen Corn

This is my mother's recipe for the best frozen corn ever.

17-18 C. corn cut from cob
1 lb. butter (do not substitute margarine)
1 pt. half-and-half
Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour. Stir occasionally. Requires LARGE roasting pans to make. Spread out on cookie sheets and freeze until solid, usually 2-3 days. Then put into freezer containers and freeze until ready to eat.

I am hungry already. Bring on the sweet corn!