Last night was the Green Corn Moon. As it just so happened, a few ears of Hopi Blue were ready to be twisted off their stalks. I made one mistake, which we diced up and ate in salad as baby corn (even flour corn is good raw, if you pick it before the kernels really develop), and then there was one which was not quite blue, which I broke into 6 hunks and tossed to the biddies. Each of them marched around the run with a hunk of corn cob in her beak, before finding a preferred spot to really attack and peck it into oblivion. Unfortunately, the Rojo was not quite mature enough. It’ll be ready for the Harvest Moon next month.
There is no sweeter and more welcoming smell than fresh green corn husks and the base of the cob where it twists off the stalk. I wish I could bottle that. I may well try in coming weeks.
Keeping with the theme, we ate pupusas for dinner, with salad on the side. Diced baby corn in the salad, some traffic signal orange tomatoes accompanying the corn. The cats got quite a few treats. Lucy’s nicknames are Corn Maiden and Tortilla Princess, and Daisy’s also known as the Queen Mother of Maize. They parked their fannies at the table and waited for their dad to set aside bits for their dish, batting their eyelashes, just about.
Then I made an altar piece, which is something I have not done in a really long time. 1 small ear of blue corn, leaves from the blood orange tree, willow, tobacco, coffee, elderberry, anise hyssop, and a sprig of wormwood. And then a huge seed plume from one of the amaranths. These were bound around the cob with strips of corn husk, stacked in a pattern. And I had my usual offering of the day’s egg, a leaf of S. divinorum, chocolate, Solanum nigrum berries, and a wee dram of whiskey.
And, following up on an earlier discussion on making poppets with uprooted amaranth plants, I carefully tugged up a couple tall ones with really full heads of ‘hair’ on them while watering last night, and they are drying on the patio right now. Gotta say, the roots are not much to write home about. They’re on a par with tomato or sunflower roots; a fluffy root ball but nothing that is particularly muscular or evocative of even skinny stringy limbs. Well, I wasn’t exactly expecting such, but heck sakes, I pull up oxalis with meatier roots. (The reason, of course, is these plants are just really resourceful about seeking water in all directions).
We’ll see what comes with drying the amaranths. I need to top some others in the yard in order to make a sacramental cake with them. Maybe during the dark moon. And it is two months away, but I need to think about the marigolds and whether I want to try propagating more of them for the Day of the Dead. They grow pretty fast.
Here’s hoping I am able to grind a heck of a lot of flour from the Hopi Blue as more ears mature. And then from the Rojo, and then from the Anasazi.
It was a sweet and homey image, us eating something made of corn, and the cats partaking as well, but the only corn that is trustworthy is the stuff I’m growing, actually. With fewer and fewer exceptions, every ear of corn grown in the US is genetically fucked with in some way. Heirloom strains are being lost forever in Mexico as farmers are being pressured to be industrial farmers instead of small-scale subsistence farmers. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that corn is a revered crop, the way it has been exploited and spliced and ruined by food ‘scientists’.
So, last night I pledged to start corn a helluva lot earlier in the warm corner of the yard, and to finally fill the front yard with it as well, next year.
