Growing Sugarcane in Cold Climates: TOO EASY

Hey everyone, it's Ross and I got a super exciting video for you guys today. This is like really a revelation here in the Zone 7a Philadelphia area. I had no idea that you could grow sugarcane in such a cold place, but you can and you can even perennialize it here. I'm going to talk about how that's possible, but what I have in my hand is actually sugarcane that I grew. And I have been kind of chopping it up and getting it ready to be pressed in the juicer. And what you can see over here is actually the leftovers of the leaves and the outer leaves and the shells of the leaves. I mean, it's kind of been a little bit of a mess to prepare to juice it, but I want to show you guys how this tastes. I want to show you guys how the juice tastes. We can even add some ginger to it. I think what I'm going to do with all this stuff is taste it and then I'm going to make a nice cocktail and bring that to my friend's Thanksgiving party. We're going to show you guys outside. I'm going to take you guys outside in a minute. We're going to show you guys how I grew it, how easy this whole thing was. And then also, we're going to talk about how to perennialize this because this is a permanent food source here in my Zone 7a climate. So I'm going to put you guys down for just a minute and we're going to briefly go over because this is really a mess here, guys. It really is of preparing this sugar cane for the juicer. I didn't expect this to be that difficult. In fact, you guys probably are going to need a pretty heavy duty juicer for this, but there's ways around it. This juicer down here only cost me like 40, 35 bucks and I'm able to get something out of this. So what you want to do is take your canes of sugar cane here and you're going to essentially take your pruning shears, believe it or not, because I find this is so difficult to get through that your pruning shears work really well. So I'm going to... See these little grooves? These are basically the nodes of the sugar cane. And if you were to plant this sideways, which is what we did, it's going to form a branch here and it could potentially form another branch here, but you can't see that just yet. There's another node there. And you would plant them horizontally. That's exactly what I did. And I could plant this if I wanted to, but I want to eat this. So what we're going to do is actually cut this away from the nodes here. In these little sections here, it really gets difficult for the juicer, I think, to process this. So I'm actually cutting this away. I'm not letting the juicer even touch this, as you guys can see. And then actually what happens when you do that is that the leaves come apart or come off easily, I should say, and you're left with the inside. That's a bit of a weird inside looking thing here. And the fact, what stinks even more is that we have to then peel this even further. This is not really going to be that successful in the juicer. So what I'll do is I'll cut this in half and then I'll get something like this. And you could peel this down even further and depending on how strong your juicer is, this will work. But I'm actually going to lay this flat down in the juicer and kind of act as like a presser. This is going to press all that juice out of here because all this fiber is just not going through the machine. It's just not strong enough. It seems to be a bit difficult. But you can see down here, I'm going to bring this. Now we're going to do a little bit of a taste test. This is just, I tasted it already and you can see it's brown because it's sort of oxidized. That sugar in here is oxidized. It's really quite good. It's really like eating sugar water. And there's a little bit, I guess, of that sugar cane flavor. It's not just straight sugar. And what else is kind of weird, I'm going to grab my pruning shears. I guess what else is weird is that I've never really had sugar cane before. So I didn't really know what to expect, but it seems like a dark sugar flavor. Pretty rich. Very sweet. And you really don't need a whole lot of it if you wanted to sweeten something up. You don't really need a crazy amount of that stuff. And here's where I planted it. Right behind these artichokes. And that's another little kind of experiment that we've been doing. We chopped down all the fig trees, guys, by the way. This is just our little method of protecting them throughout the winter time. And it's really, really simple because I did the same thing with the sugar cane, which you can see back here. This was the base of the sugar cane plant. And I'm going to do the same thing to the artichokes, everything over here. All the figs. You name it. We chopped it all down to about 6 to 12 inches off the ground, and I'm going to cover this with a tarp. And that's just a really good form of protection. Now what I want to do with the sugar cane and even the artichokes here is that we can just take some straw and really just cover the base of these plants. And this will come back every single year. And that way I have myself a perennial food source. And what I want to do right now, because I was told by my buddy Brian who sent me this sugar cane. This is a Louisiana heirloom variety. What I want to do is actually chew on it because this is, believe it or not, what he told me is what it's really great for, is chewing on it. So just cutting this off the tree here, or off the plant, is really just juices pouring out of this thing. As to be expected, you know. I'm going to try and break this in half. There we go. Let's chew on it now. And see how this compares, I guess, to the juice because, you know, the juice is really good but if I could just chew on this, it's probably a lot less work and a lot less headache. Clearly if I was going to make a cocktail for my friends, this is probably not something that I'm going to give them and just say, here, here's a thing of sugar cane, chew on it. But I guess you could stick this in the cocktail and that's maybe what I'll do. That's really good guys. It's really sweet too and it's actually kind of fun. It's pretty hard. Wow. That's really good. I enjoy it. So I want to thank my buddy Brian for getting me this. It really was as simple as just laying down one of these cuttings. You know, you get yourself, if this was a sugar cane cutting, just get yourself two nodes on it and just lay this down in a trench. That's really all this was. One of these nodes came up and it was only one node and it forms one, two, three, four, five different new canes from the base that then all fruited for me in the first year from cutting, which is really quite incredible. There's actually some other ones that were trying to come up down over here, but we just haven't had enough time in the season, I guess, to get all these to fully mature. But you know, as this thing gets older and stronger, I can't imagine how much sugar cane I'm going to get. It's probably quite incredible. So there it is, guys. There's the little video. I wish you guys had seen all the trouble I went through trying to juice that stuff. It's not easy, and I think it might actually be easier if I just stick the sugar cane in the cocktail itself. I imagine, I think I'm going to try some tequila, some ginger, obviously the sugar cane, and then I may even put some lime in there. Any ideas, put that down in the comments, guys. Any ideas for the cocktail would be much appreciated. I want to thank you guys for watching this one. Grow some sugar cane in your backyard, it doesn't matter where you live. Keep the base of the plant warm throughout the wintertime, insulate it well, and it will come back year after year. Take care, guys. We'll see you soon. Subscribe, check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and check out our blog figboss.com. Take care, guys. We'll see you for tomorrow's video.