Sugar Cane and Chives

That's chives on the left and sugar cane on the right.  Blogger is driving me a little crazy these last two days, not letting me place the photos and the text where I want.  The first couple of posts were no problem but now I just keep fighting with it.

So here's my report from yesterday April 9.  I called it "Yi Ju Liang De." It’s a Chinese expression which literally means “One lift, two Gains.”  It’s similar in meaning to “Killing two birds with one stone.”  But it sounds so much cooler in Chinese.  I guess I was in a showing off mood yesterday ;-)

The two “de” or gains were first that I successfully pruned the sugar cane along the side of the driveway down to about five feet (photo) so to give better light to the new side door garden (SDG).  And second I realized I could eat that sugar cane.

As I was doing this my very nice next door neighbor Refki (who gave me the original cuttings for the sugar cane from his trees) looked over the say hello and told me that the most delicious part of the sugar cane is the section nearest to the ground. He also mentioned that for it to be good the canes have to get lots of water.

I’ve been watering them pretty regularly so to test I cut one down to the base (photo right) and shucked off the bark with a knife. I chewed on the exposed portion and was able to enjoy lots of very sweet juice. At least three feet of it was extremely edible, and then it became too dry and fibrous. You only swallow the juice - the fiber you spit out onto the ground after you get the juice out - as one does in China.  I don't know if they still do that everywhere, but in my day the floor of the train car would be covered in chewed up sugar cane and peanut shells.

That’s about it for today except that the chive transplant (above) seemed to take fine and the bulbs are opening and they are really beautiful…

On the seed germinating front, I have figured out that the only way to water the seeds in the pots is from a tray under the pots.

Not only is does it work very well and most of the first group of seeds are sprouting now, but since the water is there for one or two days before it is used up or evaporates it actually makes the task of keeping the seeds and soil moist very easy. Even easier than when you plant into the ground because you can easily see when the tray is dry and you need to add more water…

I'll end with a photos of a cross section view of sugar cane (above) which has some strange disease. Cool red color, no idea what the disease is but it seemed to effect many of the cane that was split. You can see the split on the top of this one...