Husking Party

My daughter came in and said, "something moved in the corn bucket." Ack!  Mice have been in the garage before.  I can't stand them.  I am a city girl, after all.  We whipped the buckets outside and stood back to kick them over.  Nothing. Whew!  Or, if there was something, it got away quickly. But, as soon as they were over we discovered mold all over the husks. 

We stopped everything and shucked the corn before the mold got into the grain.   We lost less than a quarter of the ears, and some of those were probably bad to begin with.  It's a reminder that just growing things isn't enough.  It has to be stored and preserved until we're ready to use it.

We have been reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond as part of my twins' homeschooling.  Just last week we read a chapter describing a corn husking party.  They thought it was so cool that we were having our own corn husking party. 

In the story, it was a big deal to a find a red ear, so the girls looked for them.  They would hold the husk up, guess if it was red, and then pull quickly.   When we finished the pile of colorful ears was quite spectacular.  This is grain corn native to New Mexico.

The last time this outdoor table was covered, it was in onions.  The kids had gathered up the onions and put them away in the cellar while I was busy with something else.  I thought they sorted them, but one quick check revealed they hadn't.  The onions need to be sorted so that the ones least likely to keep are eaten first.  It didn't take long in the root cellar, pulling out the ones with green leaves or thick necks into the "use first" basket.  Everything else I left loosely packed to stay dry.

My husband took several bales of alfalfa hay out to the shed, ready for when Christina has her calf and starts giving milk.  He said that she seemed to perk up when he brought it in, like she knew what it was.  This morning, we found confirmation.  He was sure he had put it back far enough that she couldn't get to it, but that big cow had twisted her head through a little opening and gotten her nose way back into that bale. This morning, my husband put another board up to keep her out.

We have our plans but others have their's.  The mold had plans for those corn husks that didn't involve leaving it for us and Christina had plans for that alfalfa hay that didn't involve waiting.  Even as we jumped in to right things, it seems that God had fun waiting for us — a surprise husking party and the comical sight of a cow twisting herself into knots for a treat.