What’s freedom taste like? Free sweet corn

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Did the Founding Fathers eat a lot of sweet corn?

Just think of poor George Washington and those wooden teeth.

At any rate, if you’ve ever wanted to try an heirloom variety of sweet corn straight from Thomas Jefferson’s home, Tuesday is the day.

Becky Greiner, the longtime local high school band director who’s spending her newfound retirement as the part-time gardener at the Thomas Jefferson Gardens, will be handing out free ears of Stowell’s Evergreen White Corn from 4 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the garden site (adjacent to the Greene County Farmers Market).

“It’s white. It’s not yellow,” Greiner cautioned.
The corn was grown on site using seeds from Monticello, Jefferson’s fabled home in Virginia.

The gardens — located at Lincoln Way and Chestnut Street — honor the town’s namesake, a guy who just happened to have one heck of a green thumb in addition to being the nation’s third president.

The seeds for the corn came from Monticello’s Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.

Jefferson himself unfortunately never got to try it, having died in 1826. The “king of all white sweet corn varieties” was developed in 1848 by Nathaniel Newman Stowell of Burlington, N.J., and marketed by 1856.

Greiner will hand out ears of corn while they last — which means they’ll probably go as fast as Paul Revere on a midnight ride.