All About ‘Bloody Butcher’ Corn, Part 2: Harvesting, Drying, Shelling, and Grinding

Reader Contribution by Susan Tipton-Fox and The Mushroom Hut @ Fox Farms/Micro Dairy
Published on March 21, 2016
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When fully dry, ‘Bloody Butcher’ corn ranges from light reds, red, burgundy to almost black.

Read Part 1:Planting and Pest Control

Read Part 3: Storing, Packaging, and Selling (with Recipes)

Harvesting and Drying ‘Bloody Butcher’ Corn

‘Bloody Butcher’ usually takes 110 days for full maturity. You can actually eat this corn fresh in the milk stage if you want. You can use it to roast or for stews — it’s just not sweet like hybrid sweet corn.

If you want to dry the corn for use, there are a couple of methods we use here in the mountains. There is the method of letting the corn dry standing in the field. This method is best if you don’t have a lot of storage/drying space. The fault to this method is that, if it is unusually wet, the corn can hold water in the shucks/husks and it can mold and you can lose some of your harvest. When the corn is drying in the field, you can notice the ears that are upright slowly turning downwards. This is to signal that those ears are dry. Nature is amazing. You can go ahead and start collecting those ears for processing.

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