Corn Dog. Scare Crow. Rain Song.

A love story.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Last evening, I planned to be in bed hours before dark. But I made the mistake of walking the corn gardens just as golden evening light settled upon them from the West. Knee high by the fourth of July? I had corn leaves tickling my ribcage. Sleep deprivation marks the early days of a love affair. May it ever be so.

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What an incredible thing it is to feel your love pouring steadily in. Some eighty-five folks from near and far have chipped in different amounts to allow the work to continue. We have just over $1400 left to fulfill our Sand River Community Farm Summer 2025 Budget Request of $10,400.

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Back in from the gardens, I counted some eight hundred kernels on an ear of Blue Corn, one of two ears that grew from a single seed in a garden I tended some years ago—an increase rate of a thousand-plus in just one generation.

For the last few seasons, we have been focused on yellow, red and orange corns. But a foray into blue skillet cornbread called my attention back to the slate-colored ears patiently waiting as ornaments on the wall next to the desk where I write this morning. This is a love story about a plant whose way of being offers to reconfigure the human imagination. This is a love letter to generous neighbor Corn.

By high summer, three sisters growing on top of the hill formed a forest of Life into which you could lose yourself for hours, an orgy of silk and pollen, of bees drunk on abundance. But sisters don’t always get along just so. Hungry for light, squash vines scaled Corn’s stilt-like legs, already serving as a trellis for sister Bean. We intervened and ripped down those climbing squash tendrils. Wading into the patch’s waist-high middle required fancy-stepping. Even careful treading brought the crunch of crushed vines underfoot.

Away from the Farm in early August, a hurricane toppled towering Corn and her clingy sister Bean. I arrived home to a flattened patch, and the telltale signs of uninvited, furry-tailed feasters. With metal posts and twine, we righted the toppled piles of plant bodies, only to discover that Squirrel and Chipmunk had called all their friends. The garlic-cayenne spray I applied to the half-mature ears slowed the critters down not a bit. I think they appreciated the seasoning.

Corn Dog

Half-crazed with impotent indignation, I drove to the pound to adopt a Jack Russel, but her hard-life anxiety kept her from hunting. Five days later, the patch still under attack, I drove her back.

By the end of August, we took a risk and cut the cornstalks with loppers and moved them into the abandoned Farmhouse to finish maturing. Miraculously, the labor-intensive salvage effort worked. The kernels got what they needed from the still-green stalks such that they germinated well this spring. Half for the rodents and half for us. We are still baking yellow cornbread for Sunday’s community lunch and supper nine months later.

An email response to a newsletter about the rodent invasion arrived with word of a litter of Terrier puppies down-lake, all claimed save one female. With the fluff-ball on my lap, the owner offered her as a gift, “to support the work of the Farm.” Maizey would be her name, for the maize plant who she was sworn to protect. Maizey Corn Dog she became, a gift of epic proportion. A hundred pounds of dog in a twenty-pound body.

Working Life

I grew up alongside a house dog, but as an adult I gravitated toward the ones who make food from grass: cattle and sheep. This Maizey pup wouldn’t be pet. She would have to earn her keep: a Farm ration of beef and lamb, organs and squash from the patch she would learn to guard. Eating from a place leaves a dent that can be seen when you stand close enough— relational information that will shape a life if you let it. Becoming employed by a landscape looks very different from making a living within a market economy. The beneficiaries of the service sector are mostly nonhuman. Job offers arrive as whispers on the wind, or chitters from the tree line.

After a winter growing to full-size on Farm food, Maizey’s first forays into hunting looked terribly unpromising. Moving wind-blown tarps one day, I loosed a vole who reared on his hind legs to lunge and scream at the circling pup. I watched my little pumpkin pie back away in fear. This was not good.

From the beginning, the family who raised her said they would gladly take her back if she wasn’t working out at any point. I knew they meant it, but by now she’d taken up residence in my heart to a degree I hadn’t anticipated. Giving her back would render me shadow-less.

I watched a video of working Terriers de-ratting a barn, in which I heard the pitch of voice the handlers used to amp and orient the dogs. I tried it and watched my little pumpkin pie perk her ears and begin prancing. I pointed to Chipmunk on the stone wall. That was her first kill.

A couple weeks ago, she began taking down woodchucks. Some call them groundhogs. A single chuck will mow down a whole row of beans or lettuce like you can’t imagine. When she finds them hiding out inside a stone wall, she begins circling and barking. I grant her access by pulling back the stones. She’ll wedge her whole body into a crevice and grab the critter by the snout with a degree of fearless focus I couldn’t have imagined. Being bitten by a woodchuck has to hurt. Then she goes in for the death shake. The bodies of the big ones must be two-thirds her size.

Scare Crow

Maizey’s gaze orients downward; she is a burrow-hunter. When I direct her attention toward the pesky crows, she will bark once or twice, but the moment they take flight she loses track of them. Crows pull out young corn plants with mischievous zeal. I find their telltale beak-marks on the stalks they leave for dead on the soil surface. Exasperated, we fashioned a wooden cross a few weeks back, stuffed old work clothes with hay, attached a half-deflated scary balloon for a head and stood him up in the yellow corn garden on the hill. Miraculously, his steady presence slowed the tide of killing. His work done, Straw Man is now disappearing into a rising tide of Corn.

Rain Song

This push-pull of life and death gathers up most of my waking attention. The human dramas have to take a back seat until the gardens are established. The whole arrangement—domesticated and wild, animal, plant and human—hinges on the arrival of Rain. As a cool spring gives way to heavy summer heat, the song of rain drops on parched ground becomes the soundtrack of continued human Life.

A passing shower brings me to tears as I stand washing dishes at the kitchen sink. Rain offers her services as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Here at the Farm, that includes many beings. Each one must learn to articulate gratitude in their own way, to push and pull on the world such that Life continues. That learning offers to call us home.

With care,

Adam