I don’t know how October has been for the rest of you, but this has been a rather odd month in our household. Wacky rainy days, that thankfully followed our no-till cover crop planting extravaganza, have produced the first signs of germination with the oddly warm days that followed. I even tasted a little Brassica dicotyledon the other day that tasted quite a bit like a radish. Very pleasing.
According to the Colorado Climate Center, this October's precipitation event produced over 500% our normal rain for a typical October, in only four days, no less. Also, since I am strangely aware that almost every horror movie has been running this month, thanks to Halloween’s arrival, oh, and has anyone else seen the beginning of red and green holiday decorations going up? That just feels so odd to me as well.
All this to say that October was weird, and that made me want to share weird things with you regarding corn. That’s right, I am focusing November’s column on the wild and wacky monocot, corn, aka Zea mays. Plus, it was also part of the reason I don’t like horror movies; seeing Children of the Corn as a teenager was traumatic.
OK, here’s the fun stuff. Did you know that the origin of maize is a humble little wild grass in Mexico about 9,000 years ago? The grass was called teosinte, according to the University of New Mexico, and it’s hypothesized that it was first used for its stalk. The sugary stalks were fermented and converted into alcohol, much as sugar cane is today.
It also had hard, tiny seeds that did not contribute much to the diet of the hunter-gatherers of the day. The domestication of the seeds came later and would have taken many generations of time to create what we know and love today.
One of my favorite juicy kernels (yes, I did go there) is that modern-day corn is considered both a grain AND a fruit, and yet we typically classify it as a vegetable, so go figure. Oh, and it always has an even number of rows on each cob. Before you come for me with your popcorn maker, I swear I’m not making this up. Think about it, each kernel of corn is a seed living on the outside of the cob, like a wacky, elongated strawberry or raspberry, and they come in such a beautiful rainbow of colors.
I have always enjoyed growing sweet corn, but it tends to be more diminutive than its sibling, field or dent corn, which is grown as a livestock feed and for ethanol and manufacturing. Did you know that field corn constitutes 99% of the corn grown in Iowa? I didn’t. I was entertained to learn that on the Iowa.gov website – they have many fun corn facts to share – but I am sure you already know that.
I know this is a rather corny column this month, but it completely matches my mood as the weather changes, making me increasingly aware that summer is officially over and winter is minutes away.
Recently, my husband and I flew back to Tennessee for the wedding of one of his nephews and had several fun conversations about various places we have lived around the South which got me thinking about how many times we had to get out of an area in a hurry because we came across an old still. Now, if you haven’t lived in the South, let me tell you that there are quite a few legal and non-legal corn mash stills out there in the backwoods of Appalachia. Corn was not the original moonshine ingredient, but early Scottish and Irish immigrants brought their skills with them and used the sugary goodness of the corn they found abundantly grown around the region to create their blinding concoctions. At least, that’s what I am told.
So, no matter how you like your Zea, be it sweet, popped, fermented, or dented, just remember that wacky former tiny grass has been modified by thousands of farmers to create fun mazes to traverse that are often 8 feet tall. They also gave us one of the only monocots (single cotyledon leaf) seeds that can be a grain, fruit and vegetable all at the same time. So put that in your corncob pipe! Happy November.
Heather Houk is the Horticulture and Agriculture specialist for the La Plata County Extension Office.
