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Blessed Be the Deeply Rooted
on the roots of corn and live oaks, on trusting too much on our own ability
My father grew many crops on the farm: soybeans and wheat, peanuts and corn. Some years he would plant sunflowers for a dove shoot in the fall. If the price was right, these crops were sold. Most of the time what was planted and harvested would become food for the hogs, the primary income for the farm. This was especially true of the corn.
Hogs love corn. We loved fat, “number one” hogs that would bring a good price at the market. So we loved feeding corn to the hogs.
But corn has always struck me as a strange, vulnerable crop. From their shallow roots, the plants grow tall in the heat of the summer. You need a good bit of rain at the right times and the right type of rain to have a good harvest. Farmers pray for those slow summer storms that drop about an inch or two of rain but the kind of rain that is slow and gives the corn plant’s shallow roots a chance to drink up the rain.
Sometimes a good soaking would come out of a thunderstorm, but if that rain came too fast, the water may just run off instead of soaking into the soil. Or worse yet, sometimes those thunderstorms brought strong winds that would tip the corn over. The roots of corn do not go very deep. After a particularly strong storm…
