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Post by spacecase0 on Oct 22, 2010 15:39:53 GMT -5
Anyone interested in some seeds from M6-1 Perennial Sorghum from Bountiful Gardens? They are a little older but I won't be growing them (or many at least) this year. I am! me to
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Post by ottawagardener on Oct 22, 2010 16:17:09 GMT -5
pm me
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Post by atash on Oct 22, 2010 20:04:05 GMT -5
For those who asked about how to use sorghum grain: Yes, you just grind it into flour. I dunno if there is anything unusual about the consistency that can be a problem for some mills; I've heard it doesn't work in some mills because of a slight "gumminess" (this is purely hearsay). I suggest if you don't have any, buy a small quantity and test it with your flour mill to make sure that it will work. Then you mix it with other flours. I suggest trying chickpea flour, with the sorghum flour predominating, at a ratio of around 2 parts sorghum flour to 1 part chickpea flour. Might take some experimentation. I've seen recipes from India using a variety of flours including corn, chickpea, and sorghum, to make yeast-leavened multigrain pancakes. Chickpea flour mixtures have a surprisingly nice color and flavor; the sorghum flour contributes a mild taste. Together you get the synergy of complementary protein pairs as the Sorghum is rich in sulfur-containing amino acids but is deficient in lysine, while chickpea flour is high in lysine. These only work for non-glutinous recipes like pancakes, muffins, cookies, and piecrusts, potentially using an egg or not; depends on the recipe, desired consistency, and processing method. If you use certain vegetable gums you can even make yeast-leavened breads, but this gets a little odd. I've had rice-flour bread but I thought the consistency was like cardboard. You can also grind it down not all the way to flour, but down to the right size for porridge. Sorghum porridge has a mellow taste. Yes, I was aware of the bird predation issue and I was worried about that myself. If it's palatable to humans, it's palatable to birds too. As for threshing, hopefully someone else has an answer because my impression is that Sorghum is hard to thresh cleanly. It is prone to ending up with bits of stuff clinging to some of the grains. Someone asked about what you make molasses out of if not Sorghum. The answer is sugar-cane, but it's somewhat of a byproduct of refining sugar-cane down to a white crystal, whereas Sorghum syrup is a primary product. Blackstrap (cane) molasses is rich in iron because of sitting in iron vats, and I think it gets some calcium from just cooking down whatever mineral was in the cane syrup. Oddly enough it is also reputedly rich in some B vitamins; I should think those would be destroyed by the refinement process but maybe not. Its bitterness (blackstrap molasses not sorghum syrup) puts an automatic brake on its over-consumption. I like small amounts in a lot of different recipes to give them some character and to boost their nutritional value. For example, I put some in gingerbread, bran muffins, and pumpkin pie. I just looked up Sorghum syrup and found similar values (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/sweets/5603/2)--for example also rich in iron, calcium, and B vitamins. Dunno if that is correct, or if it is being confused with blackstrap. If true though it sounds like Sorghum syrup would be an excellent substitute for other "empty calorie" sweeteners.
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Post by atash on Oct 22, 2010 20:12:10 GMT -5
I'll look for some prospective varieties, post them, and then those who would be interested in sharing an order (does not have to be in equal amounts...some people can use more than others and I can probably use a fair amount) can PM me offline.
I'm looking at commercial varieties, unless someone knows of suitable older varieties. None will be GMO but some might be F1 hybrids because that tends to be what is available. I'm looking at early-to-midseason white-grain varieties, capable of growing in the north and/or in dry tropics during the rainy season.
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Post by atash on Oct 22, 2010 20:31:55 GMT -5
Ottowagardener mentioned perennial Sorghum. That is an interesting issue. Grain Sorghum is S. bicolor, a tropical annual. Somehow it reached China thousands of years ago, perhaps by way of India. Indians raise a lot of Sorghum too.
India has a native perennial Sorghum, S. propinquum. Guess what; both species have the same chromosome numbers and are capable of interbreeding.
It happens spontaneously in several parts of the world where both species occur, one typically in cultivation (S. bicolor), the other as a weed. The result is usually a weed. One version of it is known as "Johnson Grass"--Sorghum halepense. It's a natural stable hybrid and a spontaneous tetraploid. Johnson Grass is coldhardy enough to occur in every state in the USA (including Hawaii--it adapts to the tropics too) and into Canada.
Apparently small useless seedheads tend to dominate these spontaneous crosses, and the hybrids are generally reckoned to be weeds, especially if they happen to be about a thousand times more aggressive than fairly benign, domesticated Sorghum, not to mention perennial and coldhardy on top of it. The coldhardiness probably comes from the perennial parent, which is more-or-less subtropical in origins, having rhizomes capable of growing deep enough to escape freezing.
Anyway the two species (and perhaps others; I dunno the genus well enough to say) have been sharing genes for probably thousands of years now, which is how you get the occasional perennial Sorghum. I don't think these are coldhardy, but in theory it should be possible if you made back-crosses enough times to get both the large grain size and deep aggressive rhizomes. It's probably not even particularly hard to do. There's been talk about it but I don't know if anybody's bothered to try it.
Anyway it is probably worth being aware of the weedy potential of perennial Sorghum. Consider for example that as your production slows down or your soil wears out, so that it's time to swap the perennial Sorghum out for something else, you plow the field and plant the next crop in the rotation cycle, only to have the Sorghum come back as an aggressive weed from spilled seed and viable rhizome pieces. That possibility might be one reason nobody's bothered to breed hardy perennial Sorghum yet.
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Post by Walk on Oct 24, 2010 10:28:46 GMT -5
Our sorghum threshing methods start with a hammer mill, which is what we used for seed cleaning when we were in the prairie seed business. The hammer mill has loose, swinging "hammers". I'd have to check which pulley we're using and the motor rpm for speed - it's not set too fast as you don't want to break up the seeds. We put stripped heads in, but you can throw the whole head in - you'll just have more to clean out later if you do. After milling, we sift through 1/4" hardware cloth to remove the course bits. Then some wind winnowing to remove the bulk of the dust. Next is a 10 mesh screen to take out the small seeds - I rubbed the seeds vigorously on this screen to loosen any hulls that were left . The good seed gets fan winnowed to remove the remaining chaff. A small amount of chaff will end up in the good pile, but a little bit of extra fiber doesn't seem to matter.
As for yield, we plant 200 seedlings that are started in a plug tray (mostly because they look like grass when they first come up and it's easier to start them in plugs). The yield of cleaned seed this year was 3 gallons. That's about 2 oz. by volume per plant (we always track yield by volume as we don't have an accurate scale.)
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Post by atash on Oct 24, 2010 23:21:38 GMT -5
Ah, good, thank you for the description of threshing Sorghum! I'm going to save it.
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Post by cortona on Nov 8, 2010 6:31:05 GMT -5
atash have you find any interessant grain sorgum variety? i want to try it too because we grow broom sorgum usualy but taste it as a grain is interessant!
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Post by atash on Nov 30, 2010 1:15:58 GMT -5
OK, folks, an update:
I've been corresponding with university staff in agricultural departments at state universities where Sorghum is actually grown.
This is disappointing but very interesting. To make a long story short the big agribusiness concerns they did testing for (with a certain conflict-of-interest) they referred me to, and so far all the sites I visited assume that humans don't eat Sorghum so they only obliquely hint at what might be palatable to humans with a code for the grain color (grain color = white or yellow-- the "yellow" refers to the endosperm, and "white" sorgum isn't actually snowy white). I'm missing information needed to evaluate them better.
I've got some time to keep pursuing this because you can't plant Sorghum until the soil warms up anyway. Sorghum likes it warm--a little warmer than dent corn even.
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Post by mjc on Nov 30, 2010 3:20:24 GMT -5
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Post by atash on Nov 30, 2010 15:14:41 GMT -5
Good thinking MJC. Wow. You're good at finding old docs that are probably not well indexed by the big search engines.
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Post by raymondo on Dec 1, 2010 22:20:25 GMT -5
There's a list of grain sorghums with description in Cornucopia II by Stephen Facciola. Most are African but some are from the US. I've got two sweet sorghums to try - Sugar Drip and White African. Not sure what the shelf life of sorghum seed is. The White African is at least 12 years old. As soon as it stops raining (we're having a very wet spring/early summer) I'll sow some to see how it goes.
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Post by DarJones on Dec 1, 2010 23:11:09 GMT -5
Raymondo, Sow the sorghum in cell trays with 12 or so seed per cell. Barely cover the seed and keep it very moist and warm. Old sorghum germinates very well under optimum conditions but if you plant it outdoors in the soil, you may get next to nothing. I've successfully grown out seed that was 9 years old with few difficulties. It had been frozen that length of time.
DarJones
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Post by atash on Dec 2, 2010 1:33:45 GMT -5
I'm going to try Arkansas 3048. It's low in tannins so as to be non-bitter but reputedly high enough in cyanoglycocides to sicken or kill birds if they are fed nothing else. Given a choice they leave it alone. Don't eat it raw I suppose.
I'll keep my eyes open for other varieties. I think the bird-resistance is important though. Sorghum is just the right size to tempt birds and its seed head being right on top attracts too much attention. AR 3048 was the only one I found that fit the bill, aside from a tall one from India that might need too long a growing season. There are other Sorghums that contain tannins, whose tannin content reduces as it ripens, but as far as I can tell they are intended for livestock not humans.
Fusionpower, I was thinking of maybe starting it under protection in seed cells, to avoid problems with the cold spring we are likely to have. I know Sorghum needs warmer temps than corn even if it has a shorter growing season.
Raymondo, apparently Sorghum is one of those crops that can be day-neutral or not. At 30 degrees latitude I suggest caution with African-sourced Sorghums.
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Post by spacecase0 on Dec 2, 2010 2:37:26 GMT -5
Raymondo, Sow the sorghum in cell trays with 12 or so seed per cell. Barely cover the seed and keep it very moist and warm. Old sorghum germinates very well under optimum conditions but if you plant it outdoors in the soil, you may get next to nothing. I've successfully grown out seed that was 9 years old with few difficulties. It had been frozen that length of time. DarJones I did not know that about the old seeds, I have some that I need to try again this spring
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