A Strange Thing Popped up in the Garden That I Didn't Plant

In a portion of the garden that lies fallow this summer, there were several items that came up volunteer.  They certainly weren't intentionally planted by me and for the longest time, I thought that it was corn, so I let it continue growing to see what the mystery crop would be.  It is not uncommon to have seeds come up year after year. In fact, we don't even have to plant cilantro, basil, or sweet potatoes as they come up on their own each year.

After a time, the crop I thought was corn sent up a shoot with a head on it and I knew immediately that the mystery crop was grain sorghum or milo.

Corn?  Nope.

I'm trying to figure out how it got in the garden.  My first guess would be that the seed was carried by birds from a sorghum field, but there's no sorghum grown anywhere near our home that I know of. Perhaps sorghum is put in birdseed mixes and someone fed birds at their house and they flew over the garden, dropping the seeds?  I'm not sure.  I do know that birds LOVE to eat sorghum.  Yesterday, when I walked into the garden, a flock of doves quickly flew up and away.  They were really enjoying eating it!

The doves are tearing the sorghum up!

I can remember as a kid on the farm, we planted sorghum a year or two as an alternative to soybeans. The variety we planted was more of a red-colored grain.  I can remember that it was a really heavy crop and you couldn't fill your storage bins very full.  I also remember that unloading the sorghum into the bins kicked up some wicked dust.

So what am I going to do with this 'gift' growing in the garden?  I've decided that I'm going to save the seed off of it and plant it next year to produce at least some of our chicken feed on our little homestead.  I researched and read HERE that sorghum is an excellent protein source for poultry, exceeding that of corn.  It would be nice to be self sufficient for at least a portion of our chicken feed that they don't get by foraging for bugs, worms, grasses on our pasture.

Sorghum Head

As I was surveying the sorghum, I noticed a bunch of ants climbing the stalks and surmised that sorghum must really be a sweet crop.  Then I remembered that sorghum is not only used for grain and forage, but for making syrup.  I'm going to manually harvest and dry the sorghum soon and save the seed for next year to see if we can be successful in giving the hens a little variety in their diet.  We'll let you know if our experiment is successful!