Death to sweetcorn

Well it looks like once again we missed the optimum point for harvesting the sweetcorn to enjoy it's delicious ripeness directly. But not all is lost.

First our small forest of corn stalks needs to be felled.

Now in permaculture principles, nothing goes to waste. First and foremost is obtain a yield. So we have a whole load of corn.

Now most of this seems to be past it's best for how people eat the traditional corn on the cob. But these make perfect popcorn. Even more so, as a baker, I can make corn-meal out of them for baking corn bread and muffins. Something I'm very eager to try.

Next we have the stalks.

These have been put in the greenhouse to dry out over the next few months. They will be used for feeding the Ghillie Kettle.

Finally there are a whole load of leaves and the tops of the stalks.

Some will be composted, but most will be used as mulch on the new beds which I will be making over the winter time.

Whilst I was clearing the corn, the Wife was collecting the last of the tomatoes. The stalks may have died, but the fruits were small and sweet, just bursting with flavour.

And finally, the two weeks we've been away have just flown by... but the courgettes just kept on coming.

So much so that I've kind of lost track of the real numbers. So now I'm down to reasonable guesswork. We're certainly doing a lot more than last year on numbers, but then again we have twice as many plants. We really wanted to do Butternut Squash, but of the 6 plants we put out, only 1 came up with a true squash. The others were in fact, courgettes.

The 2017 Courgette Tally:

~130

Guess I'm going to be giving stuff away at the office again.