CORN DE TASSELING

No matter how old I get, I learn something new every day.  Trouble is, I forget more than one thing every day, so I end up knowing very little.  But, today at Saturday Coffee, I learned about corn de tasseling.  It is a term I had never heard in my 87 years.
It seems as though, everyone at my table had heard the term, and went into great fascinating detail about it.
Dolly said, “I earned $43.00 when I was sixteen, de tasseling corn; enough to buy my school clothes that Fall.”
Google tells me that in the Midwest, de tasseling corn employs about 100,000 people, mostly students every summer.

It seems that seed corn fields are planted in repetitive patterns, known as “panels,”  “blocks,” or “frames,” depending on the area of the country.
A de tasseler walks down the row, finds the tassel, and pulls it off.  By removing the pollen producing flowers, the tassels, it forces cross pollination.
Just so you know, it is from the de tasseled corn that seed comes from, which the farmers plant on the millions of acres throughout the Midwest.
Who knew corn could be so complicated?  I thought you just enjoyed corn on the cob every summer.  It  goes to show, you should never miss Saturday Coffee.  You just never know what you might learn.