Fighting a rear guard action
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
I felt like I was living in the Dirty 30s as I stood in Tim's corral looking at our corn patch. Grasshoppers, fresh from the Biblical plagues of Egypt, were everywhere — on the ground, in the air, covering every leaf, every ear, every smidgen of anything green.
We'd gotten a few dozen ears from the first crop we planted, but crop number two was completely decimated beyond belief. The grasshoppers had eaten the silks off the baby ears long before they had a chance to pollinate. It looked like some science fiction movie with millions of grasshoppers contentedly munching away.
When I first wrote in this column about my dreams for this cornfield we were planting, I got a letter from Jack Anderson. "There's some things that you've got to know about growing corn in Kansas," Jack said and he proceeded to outline a regime of spraying, fertilizing, watering, and oiling corn silks. What he didn't tell me about was grasshoppers!
"Why don't you just forget that corn patch and go back to Lehigh where you got corn last year?" my sister wanted to know. I tried to explain to her the thrill of growing your own. "You'll save money getting it from the McIrvin family," my sister countered, "Look how much you've already spent buying seed and a planter."
My family are realists and we headed for Lehigh. Now Ted McIrvin's corn field is a thing of beauty — so beautiful in fact that I took pictures! While I'd been wading through weeds in my corn — because we hadn't managed to buy a two-row cultivator, yet — Ted's rows were pristine clean. While my corn was covered with well-fed hoppers, there wasn't a grasshopper in sight in the McIrvin field.
"How do you do this?" I wanted to know. Ted chuckled at my dilemma. "Now, why are you growing corn instead of coming here?" he joked. "Are you trying to be competition?" And then he settled down to tell me how he managed to grow such wonderful corn. "First of all," he began, "I spray all around the edges of the field for grasshoppers while they are young and that pretty much takes care of it."
"That corn is my physical therapy," Ted explains with a grin. "Thirteen years ago they told me that I had muscular dystrophy and the best advice they could give me was to keep moving — the more I moved, the longer I'd be out of bed. That corn is my motivation!"
For the past five years, Ted's been helping his family grow corn in Lehigh and from his wheelchair he grooms the cornfield — and what a beautiful crop they produce.
"With MD, I know I'm going to lose the war, so I'm fighting a rear guard action," Ted says and then has to explain to us that when an army has to retreat, the rear guard fights to buy time. "You've got to get the troops off of Dunkirk," Ted grins.
It was almost worth losing my own corn patch to grasshoppers just so I'd get to see Ted again and taste his succulent corn — picked just the way I like it. And I came home and started a rear guard action of my own. I donned long pants and gloves and sprayed that last crop of corn in an attempt to save it from the horde.
It's another day in the country and I just returned from two weeks in California. I didn't have the heart to go check on my corn immediately. Tooltime Tim looked it over though, and said, "I think we lost the war!" Ah, well, next year, I'll follow the advice of my mentors a little closer.
