Family farmers keep sweet corn local in Joliet area

Lovers of locally grown sweet corn still may be mourning the news earlier this month that the Glasscock family had retired from the business. But that did not mark the end of the local farm stand.

“We’ve been selling sweet corn for 30-plus years,” said Kaity Siegel of Siegel Cottonwood Farm, who is younger than 30 years old herself.

Her youth is a good sign for the future of local sweet corn stands. Both Kaity and her brother Zach, 32, say they plan to keep up the family farm stand business for years to come.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Zach said. “We’ve adapted in the past. We’ll adapt again if we have to.”

The Siegels and Glasscocks have been the major sweet corn farmers in the Joliet area for decades. Their stands along busy streets have been a convenient option for local produce buyers.

Siegel’s Cottonwood Farm in Crest Hill has flourished with the land development around it, adding attractions to make what once was an egg farm along a country byway into a farm entertainment destination on one of the region’s major commercial thoroughfares – Weber Road.

The home farm started in 1909 by their grandfather, Francis Siegel, now runs a pumpkin festival and haunted house in the fall, sells Christmas trees in winter and has plants and shrubs to sell through the spring and summer along with sweet corn and vegetables.

Still, Kaity and Zach said there is a lot of value in the remote farm stands. Siegel’s has two in Joliet – one at Jefferson Street and Essington Road and the other at Essington Road and Ingalls Avenue.

More corn and vegetables are sold out of the stands than at the home farm.

“It’s a lot of work,” Zach said. The Siegels do a lot of traveling because if a stand runs low on corn, they go back to the field and pick more.

“We pick what we’re going to sell,” Zach said. “We don’t have the day-old corn.”

That’s the difference between store-bought and stand-bought, said Frank Keller IV of the Keller’s Farmstand family that has stands in Plainfield, Oswego, Naperville and outside the Fox Valley Mall in Aurora.

Sometimes, Keller said, he hears complaints about higher prices for corn at the stand than at the store.

“A lot of it is when people don’t understand the difference between supermarket corn that’s shipped in and what we grow locally and pick every day,” Keller said. “If you put them side by side, it’s almost laughable.”

A lot has been done with corn to slow down the rate at which the sugar that gives sweet corn its sweetness turns to starch, Keller said. Still the starch clock starts ticking when the corn is picked, and sweet corn lovers know it.

Both Keller and the Siegels say they are getting new customers looking for an alternative source of sweet corn since Glasscock did not open this year.

“You’ll find they’ll buy a dozen and come back the next day for more because it’s a short season,” Keller said.

The Kellers, too, have their methods of making sure customers get what they want from a locally picked ear of sweet corn.

“We eat a lot of corn raw in the morning just to know where the field is at,” Keller said.

They constantly plant sweet corn from April to June, staggering the plantings so new corn is coming up the rest of the summer. Then, they’re constantly picking.

The Kellers, too, have had to adjust to urban development. The family came from Bavaria to Naperville in the mid-1800s, where the first Frank Keller farmed. Looking for more land, they moved the farm to Plainfield in the 1980s and then to Oswego in the 1990s.

The future for the Kellers, too, depends on the next generation of family farmers.

“I’m Frank IV,” Keller said. “There is a Frank V. He’s 10. He’s very interested in hanging around with dad. It will be up to him whether he wants to keep up the farm. But so far it’s looking good.”