Celebrating friendships and filling freezers on Corn Day
By Jessie Veeder Scofield
“You just have to plan these things with your friends and neighbors. If we don’t, we get so wrapped up in work and don’t make time to catch up,” said Heather Wisness as she set out roast beef for sandwiches and removed lids from the potluck Tupperware, getting ready to serve lunch for her friends and neighbors.
And nothing brings neighbors and friends together quite like a field full of sweet corn that needs to be picked, shucked, boiled, cut and bagged on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the fall.
It’s a tradition reminiscent of a different time in rural North Dakota, when you relied on your neighbors and a good crop to get you through the winter.
These days Heather and Beau Wisness, who moved back to Beau’s family ranch near Keene in 2007, work together to raise crops, cattle and their four children Amelia (12), Clara (10), Charlie (7), and Hazel (4).
And Corn Day, as they call it, is a day their children look forward to each year, because it means they get to play with their friends and help fill the freezer with corn for stews, soups, dips and side dishes throughout the year.
In September, the family hosted their 4th Annual Corn Day, a tradition that started after Beau began planting field corn and the kids tossed some sweet corn kernels into the big planter to see what kind of sweet corn patch they could grow.
“It turns out it grows really well, and we had a lot of sweet corn we didn’t want to go to waste. As summers get busy, we also found that it was hard to stop and take time to get together, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone and host ‘Corn Day.’”
With the help of close to a dozen friends, corn day is a big job made a bit easier with more hands and an organized process. The crew sends an adult or two with the kids to pick corn in the field near their house. They fill up the bucket of the side-by-side and drive it to the house where a group is waiting in a big trailer to shuck it and send it to the big boilers to cook before dumping it in coolers of ice to cool down. Once it’s cool it’s taken out of the coolers and on to the assembly line in the garage where it’s cut off the cob, packaged in freezer bags and loaded up in a cooler to take home and freeze. This year the group filled over 1,000 bags of corn.
And with four years of corn shucking in the books, the Wisness clan has some favorite recipes up their sleeves. Their family favorite is corn casserole.
Neighbor and friends Kelcee and Jarrett Wold have been helping with corn day each year. With four growing kids under their roof, their favorite way to prepare the corn? “We just cook it and eat it!” Because there’s nothing better than a sweet reminder of summer on long winter nights and memories of friends and neighbors together under the warm autumn sun.