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Garden in the City: Time to Have 'The Talk' About Where Corn Comes From

By Patty Wetli | August 15, 2014 4:59am
 Garden in the City: Time to Have 'The Talk' About Where Corn Comes From
Children of the Corn
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LINCOLN SQUARE — It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this column that after a week's vacation in New York City, the very first thing I did upon landing back in Chicago was pay a visit to my community garden plot.

New readers, welcome to my insanity.

I approached the plot with some trepidation, steeling myself for what I imagined would be the devastating effects of a week's worth of neglect: rotting fruit, browning leaves, desiccated soil.

Oh, the hubris.

My garden was thriving. Without me.

Patty Wetli is back from vacation and her garden survived, on this week's episode of "Garden in the City:"

The beans were still cranking out pods, the tomatoes turning ruby red, new shoots of chard had continued to spring forth. I harvested a farmers market worth of produce on the spot, sparing us a trip to the grocery store our first night home.

And the corn, oh my, the corn.

My stalks, I swear, are now visible from space, the tallest plants by far in all of Global Garden. (Not to brag, but suck it, sunflowers.)

The single ear I'd been nurturing in the days before we left — and by nurturing, I mean snapping photos of the thing like it was my first-born child — was suddenly surrounded by siblings. At first I counted five, a tally that, upon further inspection, was revised upward to eight and then 10 and now might be approaching an even dozen.

Gah! I got all verklempt, clapped my hands to my heart and nearly cried tears of joy. ("No one saw you do that," Dave wanted to confirm.)

And you all thought I was crazy for hugging my corn. Well who looks like a maize whisperer now?

I'm not saying I regret the six days we spent in the Big Apple — the chocolate sourdough twist at Amy's Bread alone was worth the price of admission — but I am a bit bummed to have missed out on the emergence of all those ears. Because the reproductive habits of corn are infinitely fascinating and mysterious.

Up until three months ago, I hadn't given the process much thought. Where does corn come from? Duh, corn stalks.

But as I watched my own stalks emerge from the soil, sprouting leaves and reaching ever skyward, I had to wonder, "Well how, exactly, does this work? Where do corn babies come from?"

Because it's not the least bit obvious.

Beans, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, melons, cucumbers, peas — they all start out as flowers. Then bees spread some pollen, the fruit is fertilized and voila, you get beans, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, melons, cucumbers and peas. At least that's my CliffsNotes-level version of what happens.

Corn, by contrast, keeps its business to itself.

After researching a number of agriculture websites — OMG, I am now officially a person who watches Ag School YouTube videos — I now have a rudimentary understanding of corn sex, which I feel compelled to share because it's so cool. 

 An emerging ear of corn. Look for a brown speck on the corn leaf. That's a "flower" dropped from the tassel, containing pollen to fertilize the corn.
An emerging ear of corn. Look for a brown speck on the corn leaf. That's a "flower" dropped from the tassel, containing pollen to fertilize the corn.
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DNAinfo/Patty Wetli

Unlike all those flowering plants referenced above, corn pollinates itself, skipping the middle man. Those tassels at the top of a stalk are the plant's "male" part. Shake those tassels and the male flowers rain their male pollen on the waiting silks of the "female" ears below.

Here's where things get murky: The ears start out as small shanks within leaf nodes. I kind of get what and where these shanks are but I've never been able to pinpoint one with certainty until the silks appear.

The silks, that irritating stuff we all despise with a level of hatred equal to, or greater than, watermelon seeds, are actually responsible for the heavy lifting of corn production.

Every single kernel of corn starts out as an egg. From that egg sprouts a silk. The silk gathers pollen, carries it down to the egg and ... corn.

In other words, every single kernel of corn is an individual piece of fruit, pollinated by an individual thread of silk. A lone corn cob can contain between 500 and 1,000 kernels — or 500 to 1,000 pieces of fruit.

My dozen ears are actually the equivalent of, like, 12,000 tomatoes. Boo-yah!

All this takes place inside the confines of the husk, out of sight of prying human eyes.

Curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to catch the corn in flagrante.

Here's the part that it pains me to admit: I picked an ear of corn before it was ripe, simply for research purposes. Not proud of that. I'll donate to the Sierra Club or save a baby seal as penance.

I pulled back the husk, which was far sturdier than store-bought, probably because it was young and fresh. The silk peeled off in a single clump. There's no other way to describe its feel other than silky. Perhaps satiny, or, my thesaurus suggests, "like silk."

The miniscule kernels were the palest yellow, still partially encased in what I'll call their "egg sac," which had a greenish hue. At the tip of each I could see the pinprick where the silk had attached.

It was beautiful. Utterly inedible, but beautiful.

I called Dave away from the television and into the kitchen.

"Look. Here's where the silk attached," I said, holding the cob under the bright fluorescents.

"Wow," he said, genuinely impressed.

It's miracle, corn, it really is. And that's why I wanted to grow it.

If you're born and raised in the Midwest, corn is part of your everyday landscape. You drive by field after field of acre after acre until it's so much white noise.

In recent years, as corn, along with soybeans, has become the poster child of Big Agriculture — grown for ethanol and pumped with genetic modifiers to feed our obsession with beef — it's been demonized. Watch "King Corn" or "Food Inc." I did. I started to hate the stuff.

Corn doesn't deserve that rap.

See it in a garden and it is breathtaking, somehow dominant and fragile at the same time. I react to it the way I imagine people on safari respond when they see a lion.

There's the lord of the jungle.

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