Last night our corn maze was featured on the Tonight Show during Jay Leno’s monologue–check out this video (at 1:20) to see our maze! (Of course, we missed it because it was past our bedtime…)
The maze is DONE! (Actually it was done a little while ago, but now we have a photo to prove it.) Alan and the crew got the design cut into the field right before we had to leave for Montana…and then we thought we’d be returning to beautiful, six+ feet tall corn. Instead, we returned home to mournful, very thirsty corn that was about knee high and had pretty much stopped growing. Hmm, it’s not that great a maze when you can see all the trails. So, we did our rain dances, hung clothes on the line, left the laptop “accidentally” open on the patio table, all the things that in the past have guaranteed rain. No luck. We got a backyard swimming pool, thinking that would trigger a cold, rainy summer. Nope. We finally pulled out the only trick we could think of–we purchased irrigation equipment.
That worked–before we had pipe set up to irrigate the maze, we got a few storms and the corn perked right up. It’s been growing at that insanely fast rate that corn can do with adequate moisture and hot weather, so it’s going to be plenty tall for the season. Yay!
The video shows the final design, and here’s the preliminary photo below. Alan and I have to go over the photo, see where he made any errors–sorry, “took artistic liberties with my design”–and then we either go back into the maze and make changes, or, more likely, change the map to reflect the real maze. And there’s always Photoshop…
Our first photo of the 2012 corn maze–we’ll get a better photo once we correct any errors that we find using this one.
The pressure is on..yesterday Alan pointed out that you can “row” the corn already. Since I’ve been married to a farmer for a number of years, I know what that means: the plants are up enough that when you are driving by you can see the rows. Good thing I’ve been working on the design–did I mention that I’m not done, though? It usually takes me about a week to get the design ready to give to Alan, and I’m probably halfway there.
Here’s the next step in maze design–collecting ideas and images and taping them to my closet door next to my desk. I use these as inspiration for the preliminary sketches, and to see which elements will work visually. I’m also looking at ideas for incorporating math and science for our field trips. It’s easy to spend too much time on this phase because it’s so fun…
Okay, so far the maze will be incorporating GRIN technologies (Genetics, Robotics, Information Technology, Nanotechnology); a cyborg, a carbon nanotubes, some da Vinci images, including the Vitruvian Man and a perpetual motion machine. And steampunk…lots of steampunk.
Next step: start the actual design (this year I’m using iDraw on my mac.)
I thought I’d make some videos along the way as long as I’m doing the maze design–we get a lot of questions about the process, and it really is fun to do. Plus, this helps with my procrastination… However, the clock is ticking because the corn has been planted.
As I start the corn maze design process for 2012, I thought this would be a good time to start the Treinen Farm blog–the maze design process is fun for me, and I get a lot of questions about how we design and cut the maze, so I’ll start off with a lot to write about.
Here is our 2011 Icarus Maze in its final form:
But it didn’t start out anything like this–here’s a preliminary drafts, as I played around with concepts:
I love the early stages of maze design, where I spend lots of time surfing the internet for ideas and following rabbit trails of possible concepts. For 2012, so far my design ideas are the following: Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as a cyborg, the planar projection of a hypercube, DNA, carbon nanotubes, steampunk-esque machinery and aesthetic, robots… It will be interesting to see what coalesces out of the creative ether–but the clock is ticking, since Alan is planting the maze TODAY.
Visit us at the Treinen Farm Corn Maze & Pumpkin Patch!
W12420 WI Trunk 60
Lodi, WI 53555
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