Shelling Corn

With the summer season behind us, we now turn our attention to late fall and early winter work. One such consists of shelling corn that will be ground into chicken feed, polenta, grits, and cornmeal. After our corn is pulled during the months of September and October, it is shucked and then allowed to dry before being milled.

In the garden shed, I use a 1903 Blackhawk corn sheller that is attached to a large wooden box. Individual ears of corn are fed into the top of the sheller, and as the plate in the sheller is turned by the hand of the crank, the iron teeth on the plate shell the kernels of the corn off of the cob, and as the remaining kernels fall to the box below, the cob is ejected out the back of the sheller and into a basket. The cobs make excellent fire starter material for our wood-burning stove, and a few of them are made into corncob pipes.

This past summer we raised three varieties of milling corn, which were Hickory King, a white corn with large kernels that are well suited for hominy, grits and cornmeal. The other two varieties are Bloody Butcher, a red corn dating back to 1848, in addition to Reeds yellow dent, a yellow corn from 1846.

John Coykendal, Master Gardener