Corn for us, corn for the chickens

We picked the corn today. This is what was usable out of all the corn we planted. I don't know much about growing corn, this I am sure of.

We have about fifty corn plants. Sounds like lot; doesn't look like much. Out of all that, this is our harvest. If we were depending on us growing a crop of corn to get through the winter we would be like burnt toast, done.

Most of the corn was eaten by some kind of worm, some destroyed before it produced, a little ruined by ants as far as we can tell and this is what is left. This has led us to spend lots of time discussing what to do differently in the garden next year.

Next year we will try to find a local variety that

produces well and is possibly more resistant to local conditions. On the One Million Gardens site, a few people suggested putting a drop of mineral oil on the silk as it emerges and using a clothes pin to tighten the husk to keep critters out.

The up side of our corn disaster is that our chickens will love to eat this corn, including the worms, which they will find a tasty treat. My kids actually took a couple of the worms off and hand fed them to the chickens. I feel a strange sense of pride seeing my kids pick up a worm and feed it to a chicken without being squeamish about it.

Living in Las Vegas you get a weird sort-of santized reality where everything looks clean but really, it probably has hepititis. In the country lots of things look nasty but are totally harmless.