Sweetness and Flavor

 As sweet corn matures, the kernels pass through the stages of water, milk and dough.  The sweet tender stage we like to eat is the milk stage.  It is in this stage a only a short time in its life, in prime condition for just a few days. After that, the kernels begin to pass into the beginning of the dough stage where they become more solid and starchy (think "field corn") instead of juicy and sweet.  Since this window of time is very brief, we we plant several successive plantings so we can always be picking corn at its peak flavor through the entire season. Under normal circumstances, we rarely spend more than four to five days in each patch of corn before we pass over to the next. Warmer weather hastens the maturity and speeds up this process, sometimes shortening a patch's life to only 3 days.  You can see how challenging it is to have 70 days of perfect corn...always finding (let alone planning) a patch that is in a 3-5 day window.  To make things even more difficult, some people like their corn on opposite sides of these 3-5 days.  Some like it very young, immature (day 1 or 2) where the kernels are shallow and "pop" when eaten.  Others like it more mature (day 4 or 5) where it begins to be deeper and "chewy".  We try our best to accommodate everyone's tastes and, in reality, its nearly impossible to be any more accurate anyway.  One other thing that makes the maturity of the corn a challenge to manage is that not all plants come up at exactly the same time.  If there is a few days delay in some plants coming up, they will be "behind".  Sometimes one end of the field will emerge before another or be delayed in emergence by water "standing" in an area.  We sometimes go through these areas and find that the corn much different than it was just 200 feet ago.  It all comes down to our judgement, both in the picking and in the selection during selling.  We do our best to pick out what you want and like.