Today I decided to pick corn. I wasn't expecting much, because the germination rate of the seeds I planted was so poor. For a few days, I attempted to compensate by hand-pollinating, but then we got hit by a windstorm that flattened most of the stalks. I unsuccessfully tried propping them back up with upside down tomato cages before giving up and leaving them to fend for themselves.
I have not had much success with corn in the past; I'm lucky to see a dozen kernels on one ear. They usually look more like the ear on the far right than the one on the left. That's because corn is wind-pollinated and each silk must meet up with a pollen grain to grow into a kernel. That's hard to do with only a few plants; you really need a larger block of plants than is practical in a backyard garden. Although I wasn't anticipating any more in the way of edible results this year, I thought I'd try using the stalks as supports for the snap peas I planned to plant later. The windstorm put an end to that idea. I resigned myself to using the cornstalks for outdoor fall decorating purposes.
When I pulled up the cornstalks today so that they'd have time to dry out before Halloween, I was surprised to find the most filled-out ears of corn my garden has ever produced, and it seemed that some of the fullest ears were the ones lying on the ground! How did that happen? I can only guess that when the pollen fell from the tassels, it wound up in a higher-than-normal concentration near the ground where the embryonic ears now lay.
Then, as I sometimes do, I started thinking about what life lesson I could learn from these plants. Sometimes the ill winds that beat us down actually serve to make us better human beings. Sometimes people who have suffered the most are the kindest, and sometimes the people who have the least are the most giving.
It's an upside-down world sometimes, and not just for corn plants after a windstorm. And sometimes being upside-down is a good thing.
