Post by blueadzuki on Apr 1, 2010 17:34:16 GMT -5
Hi all
I was wondering if someone out there, who has more knowedge than I on the subject of corn history, could shed some light on something that has always bugged me.
it reagards those corn vartties that are on the upper side of tall (for the purposes of this issue we're talking about those whose mean stalk height is 8 feet or higher) every now and them while perusing through variety descriptions, I come across corns whose normal stalk heights are described as being 9 ft 12 ft even 15 ft once or twice). My question is as follows, given that in most corns the ears are usally only found on the top 1/3 to 1/4 of the plant, how in the old Native days when corns like these were grown for subsistance and big mechanical harvesters didn't exist yet, did people actually harvest them? I might not have all that much difficulty picking something 6-8 ft off the ground, but I'm 6'11 and have long arms, a shorter person would have some trouble (plus with Native tradions you have a lot of cultures where the corn harvest would have been "womens work" and the average female is tecnically (no offense meant) not as tall as the average male) so how did they actually do it? construct free standing ladders/platforms and bring them into the field? pull the plants down first (most likey but not a good choice for green corn (where you want the plant still there so that any other ears it might produce would develop) ? harvest it from horseback (I like the image of this, but I know that horses would be considered far too valuable by Native people who used them to be relegated to mere fieldwork, plus of course it would still leave open the question of how they did it before the Spanish brought horses) or am I making an erroneous assumption, were super tall cors like that just not grown until the era of big tall harvesting devices?
I was wondering if someone out there, who has more knowedge than I on the subject of corn history, could shed some light on something that has always bugged me.
it reagards those corn vartties that are on the upper side of tall (for the purposes of this issue we're talking about those whose mean stalk height is 8 feet or higher) every now and them while perusing through variety descriptions, I come across corns whose normal stalk heights are described as being 9 ft 12 ft even 15 ft once or twice). My question is as follows, given that in most corns the ears are usally only found on the top 1/3 to 1/4 of the plant, how in the old Native days when corns like these were grown for subsistance and big mechanical harvesters didn't exist yet, did people actually harvest them? I might not have all that much difficulty picking something 6-8 ft off the ground, but I'm 6'11 and have long arms, a shorter person would have some trouble (plus with Native tradions you have a lot of cultures where the corn harvest would have been "womens work" and the average female is tecnically (no offense meant) not as tall as the average male) so how did they actually do it? construct free standing ladders/platforms and bring them into the field? pull the plants down first (most likey but not a good choice for green corn (where you want the plant still there so that any other ears it might produce would develop) ? harvest it from horseback (I like the image of this, but I know that horses would be considered far too valuable by Native people who used them to be relegated to mere fieldwork, plus of course it would still leave open the question of how they did it before the Spanish brought horses) or am I making an erroneous assumption, were super tall cors like that just not grown until the era of big tall harvesting devices?
