That is until this summer. This summer ran off the rails by a long shot with almost two months of 90+ degree days. It turned my 80-year-old home into a hotbox. It also fouled up the growing season. How do I know? Corn. Corn is one of my absolute favorite summer vegetables (it is a veggie, right?). I buy at least a dozen ears every Sunday at the farmers market. I boil it, fry it, make it into a salad or salsa. 

In a typical summer the sweet, tasty, deliciousness of local corn makes its supermarket cousin taste like cardboard. That’s not been the case this year, however. I don’t know if it was just bad luck with bag of ears I’ve purchased or if it’s just a rough season for corn. The corn hasn’t been so sweet. It has been starchy and a bit tough. The best corn I’d had? From the supermarket in April!

I wasn’t gonna let the season go down like that. After trying all the vendors at the Jones Falls market, my mom (also an avid corn lover) suggested a road trip. She’d talked to a coworker who’d been lucky enough to eat some corn that’d been purchased from a farm stand where they went out into the field while you waited to pick the corn to order.

I hit the Internet and found a farm stand on the Mason-Dixon line just past the state line in Pennsylvania. We hit the road Saturday afternoon. The weather was perfect! Blue skies, fluffy clouds and sunshine. It was lemonade sitting on the front porch weather.

Once we actually got on the road, it was only about a 40 minute trip straight up I-83. In short order we were driving through Stewartstown, PA, and about five minutes later arrived at our destination. The stands were what you might expect and more. Shaw Orchards was part farm stand, part gift shop with a bevy of canned goods and little knickknacks. We bought some corn, a 1/2 bushel of peaches (seconds were super cheap and I couldn’t resist).

Just up the road, on our return trip we also stopped at Blevins Fruit Farm. I figured if we were on a quest I should do a comparison. So, I got a few more ears of corn and a bunch more peaches. (More about the peaches later this week. As mentioned in my first post, peach butter and canned peaches are a project this week.)

A few wrong turns and 50 minutes later we were back in Baltimore! Corn was on the dinner menu, along with Rib Eye steaks and ratatouille. I’d had my doubts about driving more than two hours to get some corn. It was well worth the trip, however. I don’t know if it was the less-than-blazing-hot temperatures we had in August or just the freshness of the corn, but it was fantastic! The kernels were tender and sweet. Tomorrow, we’ll have the Shaw Orchards corn! I can hardly wait! Sir Lancelot could not have found a finer treasure at the end of his quest than we found at Blevins Farm and Shaw Orchard.

Like many people, I love food. My journey began almost at birth. I come from a long line of truly excellent home cooks. Born in Richmond, Va., in 1971, I was lucky to grow up during a time when eating fast food was much less popular. (Though I will admit that at 6 I refused to eat homemade hamburgers because they didn’t taste like the ones at McDonald’s). My meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner — were generally all made at home.

And though we lived in the city, we were fortunate to have enough land behind my grandmother’s house to have a very large garden. My mother grew corn, string beans, wax beans, tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, greens, and a bunch of other stuff. There was even enough space for me to have my own little garden. My plantings were, naturally, a bit less practical. I filled my garden with flowers and a few other inedibles. I can still see the packets of Mickey Mouse pumpkin seeds. I planted them every year. Never got a pumpkin out of it, but at that time it was the opportunity to be outside, working the soil, like my mom.

I’ve continued gardening with my mom as an adult. She started gardening again at the community garden in Druid Hill park in the late ’90s. When I came back to Baltimore, I joined her. Now, I have a backyard garden planted with 12 kinds of heirloom tomatoes both large and small, gourmet lettuce, string beans, cantaloupes, beets (chiogga, red detroit, golden and white), curly kale, greens, chard, carrots, string beans, eggplants, hot and sweet peppers and tomatilloes. I had a bumper crop of strawberries this year. And my herb garden’s going like gang busters.

The bounty from my mother’s garden quickly made it to our dinner table. What wasn’t eaten for dinner, was harvested and canned. We made jams and jellies, fruit butters, pickles from cucumbers and string beans. We canned all sorts of veggies for use during the winter. I remember sitting in my grandmother’s yellow kitchen and helping to stack the jars, ferrying them over to my mother as she stood between the sink and the stove taking Mason jars from the boiling water and filling them.

Though I’ve continued to preserve fruits and vegges, it’s been a thrill to see that kitchen art come back into vogue during that last several years. I’ll be making an assortment of peach preserves this weekend. I saw apples at the Jones Falls Farmers Market last Sunday and I can hardly wait to get my hands on some seconds that’ll be perfect for a batch of apple butter.

I will of course share my experiences as I sweat it out in the kitchen over the coming weeks preserving summer’s freshness for the coming winter.