GROWING CORN

          "Plants want to grow......" -Anne Wareham

1988 CFB Petawawa, Ontario

There were a lot of things to consider with a garden. Dirt. Plants. Veggies. Light. Water. My mother thought about  all of those when she considered Corn . 

 She had picked up a lot of pamphlets  about growing corn.She was so enthusiastic.........

And it  was the reason, in the end,  she gave up corn and moved onto Sweet Peas.......but that comes later.

She thought Corn would be  great to try.

But where to plant it. We had a lot of lawn. 

A lot of trees. But that did not deter  her. It was going to be Corn no matter what.

So she wandered around the property looking for a good place that screamed "Corn".....

She found a nice wide spot. Just outside the dining room window. We could watch  corn rising from the dirt , as it grew.

The grass was tough ,so she dug holes in the grass for the little corn things she got from the greenhouse. It took her ages to dig the little burrows. She planted a dozen of the seedlings.

The baby corn  were new and true and ready for action.

My mother stuffed them in their little homes in the grass.  She took dirt from the dirt pile out back and plopped a goodly amount on each  baby corn. They were watered and  we waited.

They did all right for a short while. Then they started  getting this frowsy odour.  The cat had started using the corn seedlings as its litter box. My mother sprinkled cayenne  on the dirt. That would stop the cat, she thought.

The corn  continued to grow. The cat liked to roll in the baby corn stalks and claw at them. My mother erected wire netting. 

Then the corn stalks started disappearing, one by one. 

The cat was clawing them down and chewing on them. The cayenne wasn't working. There were three stalks left. Bent and listless. The cat loved them.

My mother made a small scarecrow out of one of my old baby dolls. Attached a floating scarf around her neck that flipped in the wind. She tied it to  a twig and stuck it just outside the wire netting.

The cat thought that was great. He ripped off the doll head and the scarf with it.  Ran around like a crazy thing with his new toy.

There was only ONE corn stalk left by now. It was kinda bent. Bedraggled. The cat chewed on it when it wasn't playing with the doll's head. No corn then or ever.  And that's  when my mother started planting Sweet Peas. Fool proof. 

Photographs 2021