How to Propagate Sugarcane: We Tried Multiple Methods of Micropropagation and this was the BEST!

Welcome back. We've been doing some sugarcane propagation over the last couple of months, and I ran a few experiments, and I wanted to see how they turned out before I showed you what I did, and could say whether or not it worked. So I tried multiple methods to propagate sugarcane on a small backyard sort of scale, and today I'm gonna share with you multiple ways that worked for us. Let's say you get a stick of sugarcane from your local farmer's market, or you buy it from a seller on Etsy. If you notice, at each one of the joints of the sugarcane, there is a little bud. This is capable of growing into a new plant. And all these little bumps around here have cells that are capable of turning into roots. So the first thing you wanna look for when you get a piece of sugarcane is, does it have these buds on here? Sometimes when they've been harvested from the field, they will take a machine, or they will take a hand stripper, and they will strip all the leaves off, and these buds will get destroyed. If you've watched Danny over at Deep South Homestead, he's mentioned this recently too. If you want it for propagation, it has to be hand harvested, or harvested in a way that does not destroy these growing buds, because this is where your new sugarcane comes from. So that's the first thing we gotta get out of the way. If you have a stick of sugarcane, and it has buds on it, you can propagate it. Now the common way to grow sugarcane on a commercial scale is to chop canes up into pieces with perhaps three to four nodes, lay them down in trenches. We've done this in our backyard for many years. We did this in North Florida, and we've also done it here in lower Alabama. Chop these pieces up. This one you could take, make two or three out of, lay them in a trench, bury them four to six inches deep. In the fall, it'll go right through the winter, and all the freezes and everything, if you're in zone probably seven or warmer, and they will pop up in the spring, and then you harvest them in the fall, and when you get these big canes, you do the same thing. You want more sugarcane area? Chop these up, lay them in a hole, just ignore them. But today we're talking about backyard, like small-scale, let's make some potted sugarcanes, and can we micropropagate them? Could we turn this into many plants instead of perhaps two? Could each one of these buds potentially grow, or do we need two to kind of make a bulwark against infection? So I did an experiment. I took segments that were one bud, or two buds, or three. We put some of them in water to root, because you'll see this as a method. We put some of them in the soil, standing up, and we put some of them in the ground on their sides, all in those one, two, or three bud configurations to see how many sugarcane plants we could potentially get. Because if we could get one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, possibly 10, out of this one cane, hey, now we're talking. Especially if you have a limited amount of sugarcane, or you've spent a lot of money getting a piece of rare cane off of Etsy or some other site online. So let me show you how that's worked out. We'll start with the ones in the water first. So I did this really redneck. I have this little bit of pond here, and I stuck them in a pot so the water could come into the bottom. And I stuck them in multiple node configurations to see what we get. Here is a three node. As you see, it's growing. This bud right here is going to grow. Right here is a two node. That node's gonna grow. Here is a two node. Here is a single node. There's a bud right there. We could stick this directly in the soil and get it to grow now. Here's a two node. Here's a single node. So even a single node is capable of making a plant. And I was a little afraid because with some plants, if you have a single node, you might get the infection in the side. So three seems safe. Like if you lose the node on one side and you lose the node on the other, the one in the middle should still grow. However, we don't need to use three nodes. It's obvious that two nodes does just fine. This one's making two plants out of it. And a single node will also grow and produce. So that's good news. We rednecked this as well. We took one pot. We put some of our homemade potting soil in it, which is just a mix of rotten wood chips, old peanut waste, and some compost. And I stuck a whole bunch of sugar cane pieces in it. So let's dump it out a little bit. Some of these guys look like they're ready to pot up. And I'll show you what we have. Here we have all this root development. This is one, two, three nodes. Three nodes right there. These two are gonna grow, and this one is actively growing down here. It likes being beneath the soil line, it looks like. So that's a three node. This is a single node. If we were to knock this off a little bit, you can see there's no node on the top here. We just cut it into pieces. The bottom of it is rotted. But here at the node, it's actively growing. This is going to be a good sugar cane plant. There's so many roots on these. I actually think that the rooting is much better in the soil than it is in the water. So if I would do this again, which I will, I'm gonna stick them directly in the soil next time. You could also stick them directly into pots if you wanted to. So there's a two node. I don't know if we have any three nodes in here. This is a two node. This node doesn't look all that hot. There's probably a good one down here somewhere. But look at the root development. That root development looks good, and it doesn't look like those kind of weird water roots where they're just sort of fat. This has a bunch of little tiny weenie feeder roots in it. So I would say that both methods work. If you just want to stick them in water and put them on your counter or something, that's fine. Or you could put them all in a pot. And now it's important to remember that sugar cane is technically a tropical plant, even though it survives the winter beneath the ground. So if you're going to do this propagation, make sure you're in a place where they're not gonna freeze. If you stuck this out on your porch or something, you might just kill all these guys. These are just babies. They don't have much beneath the ground. They don't have the resources to survive a frost. So we're doing this in our greenhouse. You could do this on your porch if you had some good light or closed-in area, or if you had a grow light. But the ground method works for one, two, three nodes very easily. Here is our second one, which we did another experiment in. Instead of putting them upright, we simply went in here and buried canes in the ground on their sides in one, two, and three-node configurations. Let's take a look and see what this looks like. Wow, there's a lot of roots in there. So look at this. We've got this central one is doing great. This is another one coming out here, and we maybe have a dead node down here, but it's still made roots. So laying it on its side, that works too. So you could stick it up. You could put it on its side. You could put it in water. So there's three different methods right there, all of which worked in one-node, two-node, and three-node configurations. Now, when you're ready to pot these up, this is the way I mass-produce cuttings. I get all my pots and I line them up, and then I just scoop a little soil into the bottom of each one so they're ready to start. These cane here I just pulled out of the pond. Now, one thing we could have done is we could have directly planted into pots. I didn't have pots when I started this experiment, and I wasn't sure if it was going to work. So I have pots now, and the experiment worked. So now we go to the next level. I didn't have to set up a whole ton of pots. I could just stick a bunch of pieces of cane in different spots and see what happened. So that's a two-node. That's a single-node. I'm gonna put that one a little higher so that shoot can find the light. But there's a lot of life in a chunk of sugar cane, so those shoots can come up six inches or more without too much issue. Let's see. Yeah, see, we have our little bud hiding in here. That's great, it's got roots from both sections. And now it's obvious that if I have a rare sugar cane, I could just divide it into single-node sections. Now, my original information on sugar cane came from talking to farmers and people that had grown sugar cane on backyard scales, and I read from the University of Florida what they recommended. And then I went on YouTube later this year when I was thinking about adding some sugar cane varieties to my plant nursery and looked up what they had to say, and I found multiple videos on sugar cane propagation where people were using smaller amounts of cane. So of course, before I recommend it, I gotta test it. And I will also put links to some of the videos that I found and the other YouTubers that had put up interesting things so you can see them as well. I like to give credit when I find things, but I also like to test them first. There's a lot of weird, scammy plant propagation videos on YouTube, so you can't always trust everything you see. Like, for example, I saw a short video where somebody was grafting a banana to a carrot, taking a fruit and a root, slicing them in half, and sticking them together, and then planting them, and then growing a banana tree with carrots all over it. That's obviously nonsense, but it actually looks quite real. So if somebody was just getting into plant propagation, they'd be like, wow, you could graft anything, that's nuts! So there's a lot of scammy stuff going around that gets clicks. If I'm gonna scam you, I'll tell you straight out. Totally a scam that I'm scamming you with. All right, so one node, two node, three node, all works, and you could go directly in pots if you want to. You don't have to have a cat help you. That's not necessary. If I was a scammer, I would say, okay, make sure that you have a cat here. If you don't have a cat here, they don't root. But I'm not gonna do that. You're watching David the Good, where the fountain means truth. Now with the information I've gathered, this is how I am going to be propagating them. This is what was successful for us. There's one node right there. One node. Now this one right here, this bud is destroyed. So we don't wanna use this as a single node, but it could still grow roots. So here is our bud. And this is something interesting you should keep in mind. The buds want to go up this way, the roots go down. So look for this line, and then this rough spot should be over the line of the joint here. The bud should be over that calloused line. So just look for that. You'll see the design of it after a while. I have planted them upside down and they've still worked, but, you know, we're conservative here, so we'll be very conservative. Single bud looks good. Not beautiful. So we've got single buds, single buds. And then up here I've got this double. I will probably just take this one and leave those two to grow, because that's a little younger material. Both of them are probably gonna grow anyways. But that looks like it has better nodules for the roots here, or nodes, or whatever you call them. Let's plant them. If any of these guys don't grow, we don't need to plant them elsewhere. So we'll stick them. So this area that can root is in a spot of moist soil. That's important. It's where all of our magic is gonna take place. And remember that these shoots will come up out of the ground, no problem. They're down in here, they're gonna grow. There we go, just keep it watered. And you should be seeing shoots come out of here. And then when you see the shoots come out of here, whichever ones grow and live, which should be most or all of them, you can just tip this pot out and then take them and pot them up into their own pots. Or if it's warm enough, put them directly in the ground and grow your own sugar cane. Well, there you go. That's multiple ways to propagate sugar cane on a small scale. I also told you how to do it on a larger scale. You can see in other videos me planting it in trenches or planting it in wagon wheels, like Danny at Deep South Homestead does. But this micro-propagation allows us to get a lot of plants for our nursery. So I'm very happy that that worked. And I'm going to be using single joint cuttings in soil for the most part from now on, except for when I'm planting it out in the yard. So it's a good thing to learn. And experimentation is where you figure stuff out. So if you've got a method, don't get just hung up on one method. Say, hey, you know what? Could I try this? And always be learning and hopefully you'll save a lot of money and you'll have a lot of sweet success. Thanks for watching. I'll put links to the other information on sugarcane growing and you could learn more about sugarcane in my book, Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening and in some of my other books. I am a fan of sugarcane. It's really fun to grow. It's a beautiful plant and it makes a really good syrup and you can make other things from it as well. Until next time, may your thumbs always be green.