Well, we began picking our Memorial Day sweet corn yesterday. I received a good lesson in semantics. Since we have never planted any corn this early for the Memorial Day market, we thought we should check with our South Florida harvesting crew leader to make certain that we could get a crew up here to pick this early corn. He assured us that he would have “A” crew to harvest for us.

I should have recalled Bill Clinton’s famous line that went “It depends upon what the definition of “is” is. We did have a crew, but it was not “our” harvesting bunch who are still in South Florida. The crew we got was a very small Hispanic crew that only had nine pickers while our big Haitian crew has eighteen pickers. I am reasonably certain that the only corn this crowd had ever seen was in a tortilla. The machine that goes down the rows of corn is called a mule train. There are box makers on the top of the machine while the corn packers stand on the wings of the machine to pack the corn that the pickers on the ground are tossing up into the bins. I do not believe that the mule train driver had ever seen such a huge contraption as it took him 30 minutes just to turn around at the end of each pass. To say that this group moved at a glacial speed would be an understatement.

They worked from 7:00 am until 4:00 pm, and only managed to pick a shade over 2,000 crates of corn. Just to give you a comparison, our normal crew can pick 9,000 crates of corn in a day, and are usually finished by 3:00 pm. Oh well, live and learn. On the bright side, our crew leader has promised us that our regular crew will be in the field bright and early tomorrow morning, and our corn is in really good shape thanks to the cloudy, damp weather we are experiencing.

On an even more positive note, there was some really bad weather around South Georgia yesterday, and we managed to miss all of it while receiving some very beneficial rain. Sweet corn is so fragile that it will blow down if a mule toots nearby it. We had a lot of strong winds and even tornadoes down here yesterday, but they all skipped our area. We have one more day, today, of possibly severe weather, and then we have an open period of sunny days. The rain has really helped our woods and food plots, and we are most grateful for that. We just hope that the heavy rains and storms will center over the Okefenokee Swamp today where they need it to put out the wild fires.

I hope all of you are enjoying a pleasant spring. If you need any gnats, just let us know. We are selling them in volume at cut rate prices right now.