Insurance That Costs Nothing

Four years ago a friend of our drove up into our driveway in his old pickup truck.  He got out and said he had something for me.  I like talking to this gentleman.  He is brilliant and knows about everything.  He likes telling stories and spinning yarns about growing up in the country and on the bayou and experienced country life, truly living off the land.  We often share vegetables with him and from time to time he brings me some interesting exotic seeds to plant.  Last year he brought us two quarts of blackberries that were as big as a quarter.  I was curious as to what he was bringing me.

We walked around to the back of his truck and he lowered the tailgate.  I thought an alligator or a snapping turtle might pop out.  He reached in and grabbed four stalks of sugarcane.  It was heirloom, Louisiana purple ribbon cane.  He told me that most sugarcane grown around here now is hybrid cane.  It doesn't grow that tall and is bred to produce sugar - lots and lots of sugar.  He told me that he was sharing it with me for insurance.  He didn't want me to eat it.  He wanted me to plant it and keep it growing so that if he ever lost his, he could come to me to get more.  I thanked him and promised I would do so.  I did take out my pocketknife and eat a chunk of it, though.

In 2019, the sugarcane is still growing.  I re-plant it every year.  This old cane is not short.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every stalk is at least ten feet tall - some even taller!

Right now in Louisiana, we are full-swing into "grinding season."  This is when commercial sugarcane producers state wide are harvesting cane and grinding it where it will be taken to sugar mills for processing.  I work for an oil company that is currently working non-stop to keep these farmers supplied with diesel to run their equipment.  These farmers are working throughout the night to bring the crop in.  You can see them working in the fields with lights on.  Their tractors and trucks track mud onto the farm roads.  A nuisance, yes, but I'm willing to live with it in order to get some Steen's Cane Syrup for my biscuits.

Here's a LINK to a local syrup maker that's been a local favorite for over 106 years.  I love this stuff.  I wanted to try my hand at making cane syrup at home.  In this Post From 2017 you can click and read where I walk through the steps of successfully making a batch of homemade syrup from some of the cane that our friend gave us.  It was a fun experiment and I enjoyed eating the syrup until we used it all up.  On a pretty evening last week, I was admiring the tall sugar cane in the garden and planning on what I was going to do with it.

For one thing, it is time to harvest it and plant a few stalks to keep my end of the bargain to our friend, and I'll certainly do that.  It is simple to plant.  You dig a four inch trench, lay the stalk in the trench and cover with dirt.  New sprouts of sugar cane will emerge at each joint in the cane.  I haven't decided if I'll make another batch of syrup or not.  It is not economical to make in small batches as I learned from our experiment.  I will definitely cut and eat some.  That is a given.

Earlier this week I cut four stalks and we've given them to another friend to plant.  They want to establish it in their garden.  It will be insurance if our sugar cane ever succumbs to crop failure or freeze.

I like this form of "insurance" as you don't have to pay for it.  It pays you.  I think that's SWEET!

Harvesting Louisiana Purple Sugar Cane (Part II: Processing into Pure Cane Syrup)

In YESTERDAY'S POST we talked about our Louisiana Purple Sugarcane - both growing it and harvesting the first crop from our garden.  After cutting it, we put the cane in a wagon and hauled it to the back yard where we started processing it.  The first thing we did was to strip all of the leaves off of it.

As we finished, we dropped the purple sugarcane in a stack on the ground.

We used a rag to scrub the sugarcane clean.  There is a build-up of a black smut-like substance that must be cleaned off.  We don't want that or any dirt to get into our final product.

Once cleaned, we then use a machete to begin chopping the cane into two-inch long pieces.

We are going to be processing our sugarcane into pure cane syrup.  We also cut chunks into slivers that we chewed.  It was so sweet!  I can remember chewing cut up cane as a young boy.  It brought back good memories.  The more we cut, the more our pot began to fill up.

Before we knew it, we had 3 big pots full of cut up sugarcane ready to be processed into syrup.

I put the cane into our crawfish boiling pot, filled with water to cover and then lit the butane burner underneath the pot.

Pretty soon, there was sweet smelling steam emanating from our pot.  It boiled.  And boiled.  And boiled some more.

After about 3 hours, I pulled the basket of cut up cane out of the water and let it drain real good back into the pot.  By this point all of the sweetness has boiled out of the cane cubes and is now contained in the water as sugarcane juice.  The cut up cane will be trench composted into the garden.

We kept boiling the water/sugarcane juice as we watched the LSU football game and then went to vote in the election.  I'd say it boiled for another 2 hours while the liquid reduced due to evaporation.  I also skimmed foam off the top repeatedly.

Finally what was left in the pot was syrup.  I poured it through a fine sieve to filter out any pieces of cane and other particles.

After 5 + hours of boiling, not counting the time spent harvesting and chopping, we had a little less than a quart of homemade sugarcane syrup.  Okay, I'll admit it, from an economical standpoint, that is not a very efficient conversion.  It is much cheaper to just drive to the store and buy some Steen's Pure Cane Syrup.  But, I will also say (I'm biased, I know) that this homemade sugarcane syrup is delicious!  I love Steen's, but I think ours has a better flavor.

Meanwhile, we have more immature sugarcane growing in the garden that will be ready for harvest a little later.  I also planted two more stalks in the garden soil to keep our sugarcane crop producing next year.

It was a fun experiment to see if we could make our own syrup and we found that we could.  It was just a lot of work and time to do it and was a good lesson on economies of scale!

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!)