Little Plants, Big Promise

If you’re a Facebook fan of mine, this post may seem a bit redundant.

However, I love redundancy.

Love it. Love it. Love IT!!

Anyway, we’re embarking on a photographic journey with our corn crop. We’ve learned our lesson about how to not document our life’s happenings (see the complete gut remodel of our house…no pictures… and don’t even get me started on Jack’s scrapbook, because literally, it’s not even started and he’ll be one in two weeks. Sigh.). So, with a big photographic leap, and the ease of the upload, thank you, iPad!!, we are going to take you on the journey of our corn crop and its life as it comes up behind our house.

So, we took a picture last week, when it was hot and humid thanks to a fresh thundershower, and my kids were a hot mess thanks to leaping into the puddles of aforementioned rain showers.

While you’re probably wondering how we got so lucky to have such cute kids (superior genetics, Amelia will say), and why those kids are NOT wearing pants (don’t need ‘em, Amelia will also say), you’ll note that the corn plants are barely visible. Their little green leaves are just barely cracking through the surface of the soil.

So that leads us to this week, when the greenhouse affect of the humidity allowed the plants to truly shoot through the ground and now you can “row” the corn from the upstairs windows (which means, see the plants in a (hopefully) perfectly straight line).

Farmer Joe explains it like this:

This plant is about 3" tall at its tallest point and just sprouted out of the ground 5 days earlier.

 We would technically call this plant to be in the "V1" stage, which stands for vegetative stage, 1 collar. If you look at the bottom leaf, the part that attaches to the stalk forms a "collar" around the stalk. As more and more leaves emerge from the center of the stalk, the lower leaves "collar" to provide themselves with a mechanism to stay supported by the plant. These leaves become the solar panels by which the plant turns sunlight into sugar for the plant to live and grow from.

In this 160 acre field, there are 5.6 million plants just like this one.

Isn’t that a crazy fun fact? 5.6 million plants, exactly alike, vying for the sunlight, soaking up the good rain and nutrients from the soil.

Cool, huh?

This is amazing to me. I am excited to share the growth and promise of this corn crop with you via pictures.

However, what is not documented through these smiling, goofy, and sometimes pant-less children and their corn crop pictures is the worry, the planning, the prayers, the time, the walking through the fields, the rain dances, the cease-rain dances, etc., etc. that accompany this growing season.

But, I'll take the time to document that through this blog, don't you worry!