Corn for polenta
What kind of corn can I plant to dry and make the best polenta? Is it sweet corn or field corn or something else? Do you grind your corn coarsely or finely for polenta?
Barbara Froehlich
Bakersfield, California
Any dry corn will make polenta, but we’ve found that our mature, dry sweet corn is excellent. Otherwise, any flint corn which dries with rounded kernels, as opposed to dented kernels, makes great polenta. We grind our corn with a medium grind, neither flour-fine nor coarse and gritty. — Jackie
Canning spaghetti squash
Spaghetti squash, can it be canned and how would I do it? My husband does not like pasta so spaghetti squash would be good. I have used it but just fresh. I would like to put some up if possible.
Nancy Foster
Dallas City, Illinois
Sorry, but spaghetti squash doesn’t can well; it tends to get too soft. However, it sometimes does store pretty well, so you might keep several squash in a warm location to use during the winter. — Jackie
Perhaps not the place to put this, but last week a farmer a couple miles down the road was harvesting his field corn. I don’t know if his hauler hit a bump or what, but here was this huge pile of shelled corn on the side of the road. I talked my granddaughter into going to get some for the squirrels this winter. We filled up 2 gallon sized bags, and she wanted to pick up more. So we went home, got all the bags I had at home, got her mom, and a neighbor kid, and we went back for more. In all, we picked up over 50 lbs of corn when I ran out of bags again. Gave the other little girl about 15 lbs so she and her little sister could feed the squirrels, too. We probably left as much corn behind as we picked up, a big shame. But we had fun, the kids learned it’s ok to glean what would have been wasted, and they LOVE feeding the critters that live near by us. The kids couldn’t get over how smooth that corn felt, running through their hands. Their minds work so differently from mine, and I got a lot of chuckles out of listening to them as they “worked.”
I haven’t had a chance to try very many varieties, but I’m told that flint corn makes the best polenta, and flour corn makes the best cornbread. And each color has a slightly different flavor.
I tried to grow Painted Mountain corn this year. It did ok, but there weren’t enough seeds in the packet to grow a big enough patch for it to pollinate properly. I’m saving most of my harvest for seed, but the few kernals I sampled were good. It’s a flour corn, I used to love cornbread but the corn flour in the stores around here has gotten so hard and gritty it’s not worth it.
What really impressed me about Painted Mountain was that even though I got it planted late (end of June), it was still ripe a good 6 weeks earlier than any other dry corn in the area!
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