Grow Your Own Cornmeal
The best cornmeal I ever tasted came from a fellow I met in Georgia while attending a Mule Day event some years ago. He had grown and milled the corn himself, using mules, of course. That cornmeal I brought home was much superior to any I ever bought at any store. It made awesome cornmeal sticks, muffins, and cookies, not to mention crunchy coating for fried catfish. That got me wondering: How hard could it be to grow your own cornmeal? Turns out, not hard at all — even if you don’t have mules.
Selecting Corn Seed
A second inspiration for growing my own cornmeal was Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener. Carol goes into great detail about which varieties of corn are best for eating fresh, parching, or grinding into either flour or cornmeal. Each of those endeavors requires a different kind of corn.
Based on my newfound knowledge, I selected a variety called Nothstine dent. Corn identified as “dent” is so named because each dried kernel has a small dent in it.
Nothstine dent is an heirloom variety, and therefore open pollinated and (unlike most commercially grown corn) non GMO. It’s an early maturing variety that grows 7- to 8-inch ears. It’s not particularly prolific. But it’s know for its outstanding flavor.
It’s supposed to be even more flavorful if picked after the first couple of fall frosts. But in our long Tennessee growing season, the corn is ready to harvest well before first frost. I have tried planting corn later in the season, but it just doesn’t do well.
Grow and Harvest
Dent corn stalks, especially open pollinated varieties, need more space than sweet corn plants. Whereas we space sweet corn seed 10-inches apart, dent does better at more like 18 inches.
Corn varieties, being wind pollinated, will cross with each other if they shed pollen at the same time. Pollen is shed for about 14 days after tassels appear. To prevent cross pollination, we plant sweet corn and dent corn at the same time — two weeks after the last expected spring frost.
Sweet corn tassels about 50 days after germination and is ready for harvest 14 to 20 days later. Dent corn tassels about 80 days after germination. So by the time the dent tassels, the sweet corn is already being harvested.
We begin harvesting the dent corn as soon as the husks start turning brown, especially when we’re expecting a rainy spell. The husks don’t all dry at the same time, so we may end up with three harvests several days apart. The third harvest can be problematic if the squirrels beat us to it.
As soon as the ears are harvested we pull the husks back away from the ears, and tie them in bundles of three. Then we hang them in a warm, dry place until they have fully dried.
Mill and Store
To strip the kernels off the cobs we use a couple of Decker corn shellers. They wouldn’t do for the large amounts of corn shelled by the Mule Man in Georgia, but they are inexpensive and easy to use for the small amounts of corn we grow in our garden.
To grind the corn we use a vintage Corona grain mill. All sorts of hand-crank mills are now available, as well as small electric models.
We set the Corona mill for a coarse grind. After the first pass, we set it for a medium grind. We could set the mill for a finer grind and run the meal through a third time, but we like a little crunch. If I ever need a finer meal, I’ll run some through the Blendtec blender, like I do with rye and wheat for baking bread.
We don’t grind all the corn kernels at once. We typically grind a few quarts, keep some of it for immediate use, and put the rest in the freezer. The remaining kernels get vacuum sealed in quart mason jars until we need more cornmeal. That way it’s always fresh.
Last summer we planted 740 feet of Nothstine dent corn. After the squirrels got their share, and we saved some seed for future planting, we ended up with 6 quarts of kernels. That made roughly 5 quarts of cornmeal — plenty enough to last the two of us until the next harvest.
