Right now I have a burr in my brain about sugar cane. As a pseudo-tropical it doesn’t grow below 50 degrees. It can’t freeze, but it does have a dormant period, which suggests to me that the limitations of this plant can be extended.
If it is currently grown in zones 9-10 (8 if heavily protected) could it be encouraged to have a shorter growing season and be more cold tolerant?
I’ve been thinking the same thing! I recently watched a YouTube video with a gardener in zone 8 who said his sugarcane dies down to the roots every fall, and comes back every spring. He doesn’t do anything special to protect it; he just mulches the ground well.
I figure it he can do it in zone 8, I can probably do it with a little more protection in zone 7b! And I love the idea of growing sugarcane here. That seems really fun.
I’m thinking I could plant them next to my shed, which’ll provide a lot of extra cold protection in winter.
I’m reminded of this…
To better prepare citrus fruits for cold, Soviet citrologists followed a method called “progressive cold-hardening”. It allowed them to create new varieties which were adapted to local ecological conditions, a cultivation strategy which had originally been developed for apricot trees and grapes.
The method consists of planting a seed of a highly valued tree a bit further north of its original location, and then waiting for it to give seeds. Those seeds are then planted a bit further north, and with the process repeated further, slowly but steadily pushing the citrus variety towards less hospitable climates.
The information I have found indicates that it seeds between 10 and 14 months. I am assuming that the variation is photoperiod related, but that’s still quite a long growing season.
You can take shoots from the plant before the first frost amd treat it like an annual, but that doesn’t make the necessary changes to increase its range.
10 months may be very doable if you start them indoors in early January, and take them outside and put them under a hoop house when they start getting too tall for the indoors in March or April. That same hoop house could be used to extend the growing season by a little extra time in October, if necessary. And by then, if it has seed pods it’s maturing that aren’t harvestable quite yet, it may be possible to chop off the tops and put them in pots to move indoors to mature the seeds.
It’d be a pain, in other words, but it’s definitely in the realm of possibility, and you could start selecting for earlier maturity as soon as you had seeds.
You could also buy seeds, rather than cuttings, and start them indoors from seed. That may give you more genetic variability to begin with, so you could start selecting for earlier maturity.
Not too far from where I live sugarcane is grown commercially. I can’t quite remember if there’s any in my ag zone or if it starts in the one slightly warmer (and wetter). I searched for seeds for it with no luck, although I wouldn’t say I exhausted my search.
Farmers grow sugarcane from cut pieces of cane. If I remember correctly they dig a trench and bury it in the trench to retain the water. I would think it likes damp conditions, everywhere I’ve seen it is nearly swampland. Very flat ground and low elevation. It’s considered a 2 or 4 year crop I can’t remember. They plant it once and then they cut it for a few years and when harvests decline too much they replant. I seem to recall them planting it in December, which is cold but they must not have expected it to come up until February or so. Our season is long but not 10 months long. I can ask some questions if you’d like to know more.
And on to sorghum, sorghum cane from certain varieties is supposed to be sweet and used to make syrup. I watched some videos online about it and from what I hear tastes amazing. Sorghum seeds are available to buy, and the growing season requirement is much shorter.
Even though I live pretty close to where sugarcane is grown I pretty much crossed it off my list. Our season isn’t long enough to make seeds, plus I don’t live in the swamp. Maybe I’ll change my mind one day but I want all my crops to produce seeds.
Sugar cane is perennial in zones 9 and 10. Zone 8 with winter protection. The farmers aren’t trying to get seeds, so that makes a difference. It’s seed production that takes so long.
My understanding is that sugar cane is much easier to process and not as insect prone as sweet sorghum. I didn’t even bother to collect seeds when I grew sweet sorghum. By the time the seeds were ripe the plant was caked with so many aphids and their frass that I just cut it down and threw it in the compost.
If your Sorghum grows does not amount to anything you want to continue growing for syrup then you can always get your money worth out of it by using Sorghum as a trap crop for leaf-footed bugs if you have other crops that do grow well for you that you want to protect like tomatoes.
LSU develops commercial sugarcanes so I’m sure they have sugarcane seeds. Will they give you some, I don’t know.
I guess I need some clarification though are you trying to adapt it to grow and produce seeds annually in your climate or just to grow and survive long enough for harvesting the cane?