what makes our sweet corn the very best in ottawa. 🌽 ottawa farm fresh

Hey everybody, farmer Joe here coming at you fresh from the field. Here I am in the corn and I want to talk to you about a couple of things that we do that makes our corn the best corn in all of Ottawa. So first of all, well first of all cover crops. I mean that's the part I'm most excited about. I love that this year it's an experiment and it's working super well. So right here what you see here this is not weeds. This is a mix of rye and grasses and clovers and so we grow our corn in a that not only does it produce an abundant delicious crop of crunchy sweet corn at the same time it protects and feeds the soil. And so we got this cover crop established in the shade underneath and as soon as we harvest the corn and mow it, it's going to grow up into this dense mat of lush vegetation that'll feed and nurture the soil. Second thing we do is we grow our corn organically and what does that mean is it means that we don't use any synthetic fertilizers. We're fertilizing with natural fertilizers, organic fertilizers such as chicken manure, alfalfa meal and compost. We also don't use any pesticides in our corn. We use parasitic insects. So we have these little every two weeks we get in the mail these little cards and inside are these microscopic eggs and so we go install the cards. They sort of look like the do not disturb signs and we just slide them on the plants and you know about nine for this whole big block of corn and then the eggs hatch and these tiny little wasps come out and go find the the pests and lay their eggs inside the eggs of the of the pests and so that controls the insects without needing to use any pesticides and we harvest the corn by hand freshly every week every day we're out here we're picking this corn is still immature so this is one of the things we do is we plant several generations of corn we have three different generations we have two different varieties one of is the yellow corn and one of them is the bicolor corn so yellow and white and that allows us to have a continual harvest and we aim to harvest our corn at the optimal moment for crunchiness and really tender deliciousness we don't wait for our corn to get really really huge and fat and like starting to get a little starchy we really aim to it to have that high quality tender kernel is what we're aiming for when we're harvesting so that you can have the best quality corn on your table for supper tonight.