Sweetcorn Survives a Roller

This Labor Day Weekend there will be a lot of people enjoying hot, buttered sweetcorn…but it’s been a roller-coaster year for an area business that raises the crop. Bill Pickett has the story….

Toby Brown, owner of Lingley Brothers Sweetcorn in Hoopeston, says the season got off to a rough start….

{AUDIO: ‘’The dry May and June really made it hard to try to make plantings on time, and also made it really hard for the corn that was already up to grow like it needed to. I mean it was under a lot of stress. So it’s kind of turned the season a little topsy-turvy through the first half.’’}

Brown added some timely rain around the first of July helped young plants in the second half of the season. He noted corn was planted at 14 different times this year….

{AUDIO: ‘’You’re always wanting to have something ready to go into the next thing and the next – so that people that have events, you don’t want to black out on a Friday or Saturday because everybody’s kind of counting on that corn. So, you sort of have to space it all out so that you never run out once you start (harvesting). And that’s always my goal. It’s not always achievable, but that’s always my goal.’’}

The Lingley stands will be closed on Sunday and Monday (Labor Day), and Brown expects the season will end in a couple of weeks.

The sweetcorn that is sold at the Lingley Brothers stands is picked that day….

{AUDIO: ‘’If you go out and you pick it at 5 o’clock in the morning when it’s 52-degrees, you leave it in the shade all day in the pile on the trailer – that pile stays…down in that pile it’s still fifty-something degrees when you stick your hand in that pile of corn. We always want to have something that’s fresh and as cool as we can possibly have it.’’}

Brown added he feels very fortunate to have a devoted young crew of five or six pickers who get up early to harvest the corn.

The back of Brown’s business card contains his grandmother’s recipe telling how you can freeze the corn and enjoy it during winter.