Well I tried something a little different this year.
We normally grow the Hickory King field corn and have for years.
But we wanted to try something different so we grew a Bloody Butcher variety.
We had some friends that have grown it back in the past and gave us some.
So I said I'm going to try that.
We finally got some seed.
Seed can be a little difficult to come by.
Found some seed, planted it and it did well.
We had a good spring, a good crop.
So we got it off the cob -- I mean we got it off the stalk.
And it turned off raining a lot.
So we had a little bit of issue with it drying out.
You've got to make sure these ears and the moisture content is dried pretty good so it
will work good in your sheller.
If it's not dried out good, it ain't going to shell good.
So you've got to make sure to get that moisture content down.
I bought this corn sheller several years ago in north Georgia at a flea market and there
ain't no telling how old it is.
But you just put your corn in there, turn it, and those teeth right in there take the
corn off the cob.
And this particular one has a cob ejector on it.
So once it comes down, it ejects that cob through here and you can take it out and throw
it in your bucket.
This one works really good.
It has an adjustment right there so you can adjust the size of the cob.
I don't hardly ever use it but it's there if you need it.
There ain't no telling how old this thing is.
I think I paid about $75 for it and it had a box with it.
Now the box was about rotten, so I had to come back and build me another box.
And I just mounted my corn sheller permanently on this box.
So this is what we use when we shell corn.
We'll take this right here and we'll put it in the freezer for a few days to help kill
them weevil eggs and then we'll take it out and we'll grind it and we'll make meal out
of it and grits out of it.
Now when you grind this, it is a white type of meal and grits but it will have red specks
in it.
So we're kind of looking forward to that.
So we got our Bloody Butcher corn shelled and got it in bags.
Now it's time to shell this Trucker's Favorite here.
So Dad grew the Bloody Butcher in his garden and I grew the Trucker's Favorite in my garden.
And just like the Bloody Butcher, this was our first time growing this Trucker's Favorite
corn.
It's a familiar variety around here from back in the day because it used to be a staple
at the market stands.
A lot of the old timers used to grow this and sell it at the market stands.
So we were familiar with the variety, but had never actually grown it until this year.
It's also a very heat tolerant variety and so it does really well down here in zone B.
And we were more than happy with the turnout on it.
We didn't have any worms on it and most of the ears filled out really nicely as you can
see here.
So we had this corn -- this and the Bloody Butcher sitting in the greenhouse for a week,
drying out.
We had the fan on it to keep the weevils off of it.
And once we shell all this, we'll put it in bags and put it in the freezer, that way we
keep the weevils off of it there too.
And then when we get time, we'll grind it up and make corn meal out of it.
There you go, start to finish Trucker's Favorite.
Now this here is the first shaking out of it and this is corn meal.
Our second shaking right there is grits.
What we have leftover from our second shaking, we put in the bucket and we call that scratch.
We give that back to the chickens.