It was my 50th birthday and I’m REAL hard to buy for so my wonderful wife planned an awesome trip over to the Finger Lakes wine country in Western New York state. It was a great time, we took our camper just the two of us and I made place to haul my motorcycle on the back. We had a blast, we spent a few days riding around the area then headed back home on my birthday July 10th.
On our way home we drove in pouring across 90. It got so bad I pulled off as I was afraid I might get rear ended because visibility was so bad. We got through it and drove home. As we got close we heard Akron had huge flooding and it stormed pretty hard but didn’t think much about it. The next day I went out and checked the fields not expecting what I’d find.
We got about 2.5 inches of rain in about a half an hour with heavy wind gusts that bent the corn over to the ground.
Corn is a tough plant and I’d seen it blown over before and stand back up but not when it was this tall. Much of this field was over five feet tall and it was bent and broken just a few inches above ground level.
The flattened corn had fallen into the maze paths I had proudly cut just a few weeks earlier and made me uncertain would I be able to still craft a maze into this field. I still needed to roto-till these paths yet, and I wasn’t sure what I had in the way of design left. The soil was saturated and if you tried to pick up a stalk it snapped off at the ground.
So I took the advise of my father in law Kay and my buddy Dave from Iowa, walk away and come back in a week.
I came back and this what I found…..It mostly stood back up, at least enough to make a corn maze!
The stalks were “Goosenecked” and bent but the plants had mostly righted themselves. The field sort of shifted over about a foot but it all moved in a relative fashion so the paths I had mowed earlier were maintained.
Tilling the paths went well and we were able to clean up the edges nicely and it made for a great aerial photo.
We ended up getting a great picture and had a record year for the fall. And best of all when we harvested later in November the field yielded over 140 bushels to the acre even with all the paths cut out of it!