Couple raises corn while the sun shines in Havre

Stu and Carolyn McIntosh will have more homegrown sweet corn by next month than they will know what to do with.

They will try, Stu McIntosh said Tuesday during a tour of his Havre property, to find a home for the entire acre of corn. They will donate some to the food bank, they will sell a good chunk of it at Saturday Market, and other markets, and they will eat their share, too, he said.

The McIntoshes are retired farmers. They went from being the owners of two Hill County farms to living on a two-and-a-half-acre plot near Havre High School in 1998.

McIntosh said they needed something to do, so they take full advantage of the land and the well it came with.

"Got my own well, thank God," he said. "If we didn't have our own well, we couldn't raise it."

The McIntoshes have a drip system comprising a series of valves and hoses, with the latter being sprawled out between the rows of corn and near the raised patches of other produce.

Without the well water, they wouldn't have any corn, McIntosh said, adding that corn, which is not a common crop in this region, needs heat and moisture to grow. This season the region has had plenty of one and barely anything of the other. Normally, McIntosh said, they would water the corn every three days. But this year is not normal.

"This'll go down in the record books," he said of this year's drought.

Every 12 hours, he alternates water to one of four corn patches. An outside row on one of the east side's patches - half as tall as the other and semi-wilted - is a perfect example of what the corn would look like should it have been solely dependent on natural moisture, McIntosh said.

In addition to the sweet corn, the McIntoshes also grow buttercup squash, cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, beets, raspberries and apples. The squash isn't doing so well this season, McIntosh said, because it doesn't do well in extreme heat.

Every morning around 6, he said, they get up and tend to their garden. They tend to it again, in the evening.

It's the secret to his long life, McIntosh said. Just months away from 90, he attributes his long life to gardening

"It's the best exercise I get," he said, adding that the sweet taste of corn isn't bad either.