I’ve spent a lot of time lately pondering the life cycle of corn, as I’m sure you have, too. If there is any better way to mark the passage of summer in Illinois, I don’t know what it is.
That thought came home to me the other day as I sat on the patio, shucking what would probably be the last of the best farmer’s market corn for this season. I was in no hurry, sitting in the Huntley autumn sunshine, admiring the perfect symmetry of a perfect ear of corn that would perfectly grace my dinner table that night.
The kernels were egg-yolk yellow — not a bad one in the bunch — and I ran my finger slowly up one endless kernel-queue from stem to tip, and then down the next. How many seeds in a row, I wondered. And how many perfect rows, side by side? Is it exactly the same number of rows and kernels on each ear of corn?
Has anybody ever bothered to count, not just on one ear but on four of them, to answer such burning questions?
I started counting. Ear after ear.
Of course I did.
I’ll tell you what I discovered in my deep-dive into corn-counting, but I don’t want to spoil the suspense too soon. I’ll give you time to shuck and tally for yourself, just in case you happen to have an unshucked-and-uncounted ear lying around the house.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
I ride my bike almost every morning on Sandwald road, which stretches corn-luscious and maize-wonderful from Dahmer Road south to Big Timber Road and back again. It would be hard not to be a corn-ponderer when you start each day like that.
Each day I jingle my bike bell to wish a good morning to all the usual suspects along the way — the bustling Mother Road of I-90, the grain-munching calves and cows of the cattle farm, the lone house selling cactus plants in pots lining the planting beds next to the front porch.
And, of course, I wish a good morning each day to the corn — the tiny green sprouts of May, the growing young stalks of June and July, the arching tassles of August, and finally the goldening rows of September yielding patch by patch to the harvesting machines. I jingle to them every morning, praising them on their beauty, assuring them that I will be there with a pleasant “good morning” every day of their lives, from sprout to silage.
I can’t think of a better way to measure the passing days of summer than to peddle a bike morningly betwixt endless rows of corn, with each stalk sprinting a quick lifetime from birth to bundling, all in a single season — a northern Illinois summer.
You could never get such a vivid sense of the passing seasons in other places — like Florida, for example. The only way to know that a season is passing in Florida is to watch the Walmart displays change from turkeys, to tinsel, to tins of jelly beans.
But not here in Illinois, where the corn keeps you posted day by day, reminding you that seasons pass, year after year, as many times as you are lucky to take note of their here-again-and-gone passing.
Ah, you can learn so much from corn.
But I’ve kept you waiting long enough, haven’t I? I promised I would tell you how many kernels there are on an ear of sweet Illinois summer corn.
Well, it turns out that each ear is slightly different from other ears, but not by much.
The four ears I lovingly counted had between 36 and 38 kernels stretching from stem to tip on each row.
And crowded next to each other around each ear were somewhere from 20 to 22 of those rows.
That means that an average ear of corn from the Woodstock farmer’s market in September carries—give or take—around 800 kernels of summer sweetness. (I did the math, but don’t ask me to show my work. I’d tell you the dog ate my homework, but I don’t have a dog, so… yeah.)
But why stop there? What about all those strands of silk peeking out at the tip, slowly turning from green, to auburn, to brown? How many silk strands are there in an ear of corn?
I had to know that, too, before I was finished.
Of course I did.
Imagine the challenge of counting the strands by hand. After all, it was breezy there on the patio in the warm Huntley sun. Imagine the frustration of untangling the shifting strands one by one and wondering if I had counted that one already.
I “counted” them in a different way — by asking Mama Google, who told me what I suspected to be true: that there are exactly the same number of silk strands as there are kernels of corn, because each strand is an elongated stigma carrying tassel pollen to fertilize a single ovule, or kernel.
But that’s a lot of fancy talk to gain knowledge that’s nowhere near as satisfying as counting for yourself.
So don’t take Mama Google’s word for it — or even my word, for that matter. Go ahead and pick up that last ear of sweet summer Illinois corn before the season is gone for another year, and count for your own shucking self.
I promise you it will be time well spent.
And if you ever get around to tallying all the seeds lurking in that log-thick zucchini, let me know.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
