On the Side: Hear, hear: Ears of sweet distinction

Once again last week, rows of Mirai were tracing the hillside at Pete Flynn's produce farm off Route 926 near West Chester, their stalks notably shorter, younger-looking, and spaced farther apart then you'd expect on the cusp of August.

That portended a modest yield, though maybe that's as it should be: This is a luxury corn (now going for 69 cents an ear), a boutique corn, careful about overexposure; it knows, or would if it were a knowing thing, that it will be the life of the party whenever, wherever a pot is set to steaming: Oh, for a life of such surety.

Flynn has tall, green allees of trellised heirloom tomatoes, too - Bull's Hearts and Brandywines and other equally sensitive and popular types, a large percentage of which will break or die on the vine, or at least not make it presentably to market.

But the ones that do? Aha, they're right up there with the Mirai, tribunes of grand flavor, pricey and proud of it: With so many deaths in the field, each survivor's value goes up. (Mirai has also become a barometer of the souring economy; sales by the ear are sharply up; by the dozen, down.)

Mirai (MEE-rye) is a perfect eating corn in an imperfect world. It has what they call in the trade "good tip fill," and exceedingly few orthodontic problems. It is tenderer than nearly any contender - it is a cross between tender sugar-enhanced corns and sweeter supersweets - each kernel's skin stretched thin and tight, poised to pop from the cob, eager to surrender its nectar.

And it is, yes, endearingly sweet (at 20 percent sugar content), but not cloyingly so. It is in the midrange of the supersweet varieties. In the age of candy corn, blessedly, it still tastes like a memory of August corn.

To a child of New England, in fact, it tastes pretty close to what was once called Butter and Sugar corn, crisp and fresh-picked at the farm down the road, shiny pearl-and-gold on small cobs, a half dozen of which could be mindlessly devoured at a sitting.

To someone else, well, that's for them to remember. Or maybe it tastes like nothing you've ever had before.

It is the determinedly, and counterintuitively, yellow variety of Mirai that is such a beauty, though recently a bi-color option has become available. At his 200-acre Pete's Produce Farm, Flynn also grows the ruling whites - Sugar Pearl, White-Out and Silver King (the successor to Silver Queen): He has farmstand customers who think that's the only way to go.

Which may not be an entirely bad choice. Mirai is the crack of corn; one hit and you're hooked. I got my first taste five years ago. Now I score whenever I can, always buying extra ears - at a rather dear $7.49 a dozen - to tote to the office and the neighbors.

Mirai is a product (a happy one, in this case) of middle American seed research. But because it requires hands-on coddling, it was never suited up for the big game: This is not a Big Ag player.

Instead it trotted off to Japan, a perfect fit for its modest boutique vegetable farms, where moisture can be calibrated, and crops can be picked by hand, not machine. It was designated something of a specialty item, a Vidalia-like creature, a fruit almost, nice for dessert.

That particular growing style, as it turns out, is not unlike the farming that Pete Flynn does here behind Westtown School, small-scale and attentive in the shrinking patch of green south of West Chester.

So down along Route 926, we pick a few armfuls, snapping them off the stalk, peeling and gnawing on an ear or two.

Then we head for the watermelon patch, while the melons are still cool, and Flynn hoists one waist high, watching it split in half as he drops it on a hump of Chester County's silty loam.

We grab off hunks of sugary melon, smiling in the sun.

The Mirai harvest is safely in - at least for the morning.