Honestly, I’m not certain when I was old enough to notice my family and our sweet corn freezing process. Only that we have done it all the years we have been farmers. Technically Dad became a farmer when I was 5, but Papaw Freddy was always a farmer at heart. So it would seem forever.
I personally didn’t start helping though until I was a teenager and could understand how to help. It has been an annual task for me since then. The only difference from then and now is we would take more than one day and maybe up to 3 days to grab the corn and shuck it and freeze what we got each day. There are early memories of mine helping Grandpa Freddy and Dad grab corn from the field when he had a big patch of corn either south of our house or west. It allowed us to give friends and family bags of corn and have dozens of quart bags for us to freeze for ourselves.
Yes it is work. These memories will forever stay with me and are why I couldn’t let the corn go to waste last night when I saw the two crates full. This is everything I have loved about being a family farm. Our family knowing each task and stepping in when needed to. I have done each task. Getting the corn, shucking the corn and cutting out the bad parts, boiling the water and the corn, for a few short minutes. Then putting the corn into ice baths: at least two, taking them out of the water and drying them. We have a cutter and a setup to cut it up and bag it then a second bag to freeze it downstairs until we use it.
This time it was just 3 of us and Mom was limited with her fracture, but she helped quite a bit. My brother was a bit intimidated by the cutter, but he did help. I was the main cutter, and put my brother in charge of boiling and moving the corn into the main ice bath. Then Mom one-handed did have to help at one time to move the corn into the second ice bath. Literally a labor of love and a family work experience. Something we all miss since the farm is in name only now. Dad worked last night so we were able to accomplish this without him so that he could get the sleep he needed to get this morning for work tonight.
Not long after I started cutting the corn maybe somewhere between 5 to 10 shucks in; I got cut. No matter how many times I do this I tend to always get cut one way or another. Sometimes I use that as an opportunity for someone else to cut and I did James did some cutting but not for long. I had to bandage it really well and it still was wet pretty much all the way through, but I got the job done. There were three times I thought I had made the initial cut worse, but thankfully it didn’t. I have had worse bleeding, but I have never got blood into the corn. I’m kind of OCD when it comes to that kind of thing.
Do you have a favorite vegetable?
Jewells of Thought 
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