Just how high is that corn?

Published 8:42 am Thursday, July 3, 2025

By Bonnie Brown

Columnist

Have you heard the expression “When the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, And it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky!” 

I can remember hearing this expression after I had moved to Mississippi, and I thought it was just a local saying.  But after my husband Tom and I married and we began to garden, it took on some importance.  The corn should be tall around July 4th.  Which makes corn on the cob a holiday food favorite at celebrations across the nation.  

Our first garden was accomplished with a hoe, a rake, and a weedeater because we planted our garden at our late friend Helen Wetherbee’s small parcel of land near her home. Our gardening efforts produced squash along with a few cucumbers, a few tomatoes, and perhaps a few twigs of poison ivy.  

Given that Tom and I both grew up in families where we participated in tending the garden and harvesting the vegetables, we weren’t a total failure which encouraged our next efforts after we moved into our home on Woodson Ridge Road.  We had about 11 acres which had produced soybeans prior to our moving in so we knew things would grow there.  So did lots of kudzu!  We set out tomato plants, planted peas, potatoes, butter beans, and corn.  We also set out strawberry plants.  We had little success with asparagus, which was okay since our sons Dennis and Jeffrey weren’t fond of that particular vegetable.  

We were pleased with our efforts, so much so that Tom graciously bought me a rototiller tractor for Mother’s Day!  Whoop-whoop!  What woman doesn’t want a rototiller tractor for Mother’s Day?  Well, this one did, and it made life easier.   Of course, the ye olde hoe also came into play but the tractor was a big hit.  

I was eager to see if our corn was going to be “as high as an elephant’s eye” come Fourth of July!  If the lyrics were written for a musical and the farmers took it as a given that the corn would be ready to eat, I was counting on it.  

To be honest, I don’t remember if we had corn from our garden on the first Fourth of July on Woodson Ridge, but I do know that our garden was a lot of work and produced a lot of delicious vegetables for our family.  We had strawberries and our younger son Jeff announced that he was going to build his house where the strawberry patch was and live there close to us when he grew up.  Well, that didn’t come to fruition.  We sold the house in 2007 after the boys had married and we had given up raising a garden some time before that.  I had to convince my husband that we could find food in stores and farmers’ markets instead of raising a garden ourselves.  It took a lot of convincing.  

Dennis married in 1997 and moved to Jackson shortly afterwards.  Jeff married in 2003 and didn’t build the house in the strawberry patch as he had planned.  But I will say that we all missed our place on Woodson Ridge and still do.  It was a wonderful place for them to grow up, and we loved it there.  But life moves on.  Thankfully, our boys and their beautiful wives are fairly close by in near zip codes.  

I’m going to be checking the corn around here to see if it’s as tall as an elephant’s eye.  You do the same.  And hopefully, we can enjoy some delicious corn on the cob.  Happy 4th!