Summer Gold> People drive miles for Sangerville

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Like bees to a hive, people swarm this time of year to a small vegetable stand in Sangerville.

It’s corn harvest time and Rainie and Sid Stutzman have plenty of the sweet, succulent vegetable that people drive miles and miles for.

“Everyone comes to Stutzmans because they know it’s going to be good,” said Gwen O’Connor of Sangerville. One recent August day, she hurried over to the Stutzman Farms to fetch fresh corn in between meeting some friends.

For Marilyn Doble of Bowerbank, the half-hour drive she makes to visit the stand is time well spent. Picking up an ear of corn, and pulling down its husk a wee bit to peek at the bright yellow and white kernels inside, the Stutzmans’ corn “tastes awfully good,” she remarked.

Doble, who was buying corn in bulk in anticipation of company, said the Stutzmans’ sweet, juicy corn is in a class of its own. “It’s delicious. We’ve been coming here for a long time.”

Rainie said she believes her corn is such a draw because it’s freshly picked at least three times a day. “We sell out every day and we make sure everything is fresh,” she said.

Chatting with Doble as she made her purchases, Rainie advised her that she’ll have a new kind of corn coming in a few days called Ecstase.

Doble, in turn, shares that she’ll have one visitor over the weekend who wears braces on her teeth, so she’ll have to cut off the corn from the cob for her.

All day long, and all week long, the small vegetable stand is busy with cars coming and going. People venture from as far away as Greenville and East Corinth, and the customers include seasonal as well as year-round residents. The corn is stuffed into plastic bags or carried under arms to awaiting vehicles.

“I think corn is the most popular vegetable,” Sid said.

For the Stutzmans, the fall harvest ends a year of long hours and little sleep. They’ve had to protect their 40 acres of crops, eight of which are devoted to corn, from heavy rains, drought, insects and animals.

One year, the couple even resorted to a propane-powered cannon that boomed each night during the corn harvest to scare away raccoons. While the device succeeded, it wasn’t liked much by neighbors.

A perky blonde who looks more like a fashion model than a farmer, Rainie spends winters pouring over seed catalogs, studying up on new varieties in an attempt to find better and hardier corn. She’s become an expert on the vegetable, but jokes that she got the job because she was the fastest corn picker. She said she orders the seeds in December and January. Planting starts as soon as the frost leaves the ground.

Rainie said the early-bird varieties of corn are money makers even though they lose flavor quicker because they are not generally as high in sugar content. She is devoting more time to find ways to plant corn earlier for this market.

Chuckling, she said it’s not unusual for people to begin asking them in May when the corn will be ready because grocery stores have the vegetable for sale. Her husband’s reply is that they’ve got to get the seeds into the ground first. Seeds are planted mechanically, although the crops had to be reseeded by hand earlier this season when several weeks of rain in June wiped out most of the first crop. The planting was done by hand to preserve those plants that survived the wet weather, said Sid, who works in the fields dressed in a tee shirt and faded blue jeans.

A local farmer fertilizes the Stutzmans’ corn with manure in exchange for waste potatoes. The pair say one of the hardest parts of growing corn is keeping the insects out. They suspect the moths, which produce the larvae that become corn borers and earworms, are blown into the area during southerly gusts of wind. So they stay abreast of weather changes, watching for the telltale sign of brownish moths flitting above the corn, when winds are predicted.

When the moths have laid their eggs, the resulting larvae can devastate a crop unless pesticides are used. During the growing season, the Stutzmans keep in touch with local University of Maine Cooperative Extension agents and other specialists for information on these pests.

The couple say more research is being conducted on corn by seed producers than any other vegetable. “They keep coming up with better corn every year,” Sid said.

This season, the Stutzmans grew seven varieties of corn including Quickie, an early corn, Ecstase, which is a later variety, and Burgundy Delight, another later variety and favorite of many consumers.

“It’s beautiful because it’s a long ear with a burgundy husk, but the best part is when you get it in your mouth,”‘ said Rainie of Byrgundy Delight. She calls it, often requested by name, their flagship corn.

Many people still ask for a variety called “Sugar and Gold” corn, but that variety has been phased out in their business because it produced short ears of corn, Rainie said.

A mom-and-pop-operation, the Stutzmans plant only what they can handle without much help. “We try to plant most of what we can sell retail,” Sid said.

The couple have been at it for about 25 years and represent the third generation in the Stutzman family to farm in the same location. Their workday begins at 6 a.m. and ends around 7 p.m., when the stand is closed and telephone orders are completed.

It was the late Otto Stutzman who started the little corn stand about 40 years ago. He began as a dairy and potato farmer, but added corn over the years. One year, the elder Stutzman allowed his son, Bob, to pick left-over corn that the family couldn’t use and sell it beside the road to raise money for the Skowhegan Fair. The young boy’s success — wearing a cowboy hat and selling corn from a card table — convinced his father to raise more corn and to covert the garage into a vegetable stand.

It’s that same garage that serves Rainie and Sid’s business today. They live in the family homestead that was built in the 1860s and use the large weathered barn for the winter storage of their vegetables.

Sid likes to tell how the barn was built. His Lithuanian step-grandfather had 10 children and when the barn burned to the ground in 1919 there was little time to completely rebuild it. The patriarch told his youngest son, who was 13 at that time, to shingle the 60-foot by 50-foot barn. He did as he was told and alone shingled the roof on the five-story-high building.

Sid said he is proud of his heritage but both he and his wife are quick to say that they would not encourage anyone contemplating farming as a livelihood. “The weather patterns are definitely changing and it makes it pretty risky to grow corn and other vegetables,” Sid said.

“When you’re sitting in the house and you’ve got just about every penny you own in the ground and you look out and see a rain and hail pounding the plants, that’s when a lot of thoughts cross your mind,” he said.

But for now, the weather is obliging and the Stutzmans are picking as fast as possible to keep up with the demand for their sweet juicy corn.