Harvesting Louisiana Purple Sugar Cane (Part 1)

Last year a friend of mine dropped by the house and pulled a gift for me out of the back of his truck.  You can read about that gift if you click here to read our post on planting purple sugar cane.  He had brought some stalks of heirloom Louisiana Purple Sugar Cane for me to plant in the garden.  He had some growing in his garden, but wanted to give me some to start in mine in the event that his sugar cane died and he lost it, he could get some stalks from me to re-start it.  Kind of like insurance, I guess.

So I planted it and a year later, here we are:

It isn't a huge crop, but it is just the right amount for us.  Some of the sugarcane leans over and the leaves are very sharp.  You have to watch out not to get cut when walking by it.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the sugarcane is 10 feet tall!  It is appropriately named "Purple Cane," as it is very purple.  It has a nice size to it, too.  All of the commercially grown sugar cane around here that I see is green, not purple, and it isn't as tall as the purple cane is.  Isn't the purple sugarcane pretty?

A quick look on the Internet gave me some more details about our sugar cane.  The following FROM THIS LINK tells some interesting information about its history:

Sugarcane harvesting came to the U.S. approximately 200 years ago, with prosperous mills being developed in Louisiana. Sugarcane was first brought to Louisiana by Jesuit priests in 1751. Here, Etienne de Bore produced the first refined sugar from a sugarcane crop in 1795. His variety, named “Creole,” was one of many, including Otaheite, Louisiana Stripes, Louisiana Purple, and D74, to be developed in Louisiana.

What a cool new crop to grow in the garden!  This past Saturday, Russ and I harvested some of the mature stalks of purple sugar cane.  Commercial sugar cane farmers have expensive equipment.  For our tiny patch of sugar cane, we got back to the basics and used an 'old school' machete.  Russ chopped each mature stalk of cane down at the base and handed it to me.

Commercial sugar cane farmers have large cane wagons that are pulled by tractors and line the side of the roadways during harvest season loaded with chopped cane.  Here is our sugar cane wagon "loaded down" on the side of the 'field.':

During sugarcane harvest, the sides of the road are littered with pieces of sugarcane stalk that has blown out on its way to be processed.  We were very careful not to let any of our cane drop out of the wagon.  So what do you do with fresh harvested sugar cane?  Well, you process it, of course!  Tune in tomorrow where we will have our concluding segment where we show you what we did with it.  (Actually we did two things with it!)