In this video, I mentioned at 8:33 that sorghum could cross pollinate with corn. It’s actually just the opposite. I was remembering incorrectly something I learned in my first year when planting broomcorn sorghum that I could put the broomcorn sorghum between my varieties of corn in order to make a wall between them so that the varieties of corn wouldn’t cross pollinate.
😆 haha! Welcome to Willows Green Permaculture! That’s what they do at the Shire! My kid was away for a time after we first set up here and when she came back she said… Wow! It looks like the Shire!
For your mosquito issue, you should consider mosquito fish minnows (Gambusia affinis). The are live birth fish, are hardy in a range of temps and oxygen levels and they are excellent eaters of mosquitos and require next to no care or upkeep. They are native to North America. I have them in my small suburban pond in Austin, TX. We've always had horrible mosquitos in the summer. I started off with 20 minnows and now have about 200 in my 400 gallon pond. Since then the mosquitos have been decimated! And my red slider turtles like eating them, as would that cute little snapping turtle! There's a statue of one in Sochi, Russia for solving their malaria problem.
Fun to see the chinampas idea in miniature. I never spray or pull poison ivy but I also don't support it, it doesn't need my help. I smother it with chop\drop whenever I see it, it has slowly weakened a powerful patch on a hillside garden over the years.
Thank you for the tip. I covered some in a thick layer of woodchips in the garden, a tiny patch, and it still survived. A real vine. I’m going to have to pull it as soon as the ground thaws, because it’s inside our garden.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture Yeah, I've never killed a vine this way. Just kept it from spreading out of it's area and diminished that boundary a bit. I'm curious about having someone bring some goats through it, they love eating it.
@@HoboGardenerBenyes, Ive read that. But they’ll eat everything else too! 😊 It might work if it’s all you have. I don’t know if the goats pull your roots first you. I doubt it. So you’d have to have them back a number of times. We have poison ivy because the dear eat it. And they eat the fruit in winter and spread it.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture That'd be funny to try to use goats to eliminate a patch and they just end up spreading the seeda with their poop like the deer :)
Thank you Alsan. This year especially we have lots of water with all the rain. It’s a good thing we did the canals and the culvert, because we may have had severe erosion if we hadn’t done it. It was a great learning experience and particularly satisfying seeing the successful results.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture it is amazing how lucky we are with our approach to life. you balance a wet property, and i have balanced a dry one. makes all that work worth it for us old guys 🙂
Always wonderful to see you both out doing what you love. Wish more people would understand how important it is to leave room for nature. The mustard is flowering and green beans are to the top of cattle panels & nastrum flowers are blooming here. Take care
love sorghum. i grow the seed varieties though as it is one of my staple grains. i have been tempted to experiment with the syrup sorghum. it takes so much work to process the syrup though!
Yes. Like maple syrup, except even more. I do like to chew on the stem hearts though. This year, I added a variety. Popping sorghum - a seed variety. I got that from Fruition Seeds in NY, if I recall correctly.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture i have heard about that. let me know how it goes, i may try that next year. i don't eat popcorn but when i was young i used to love popped rice so sorghum may be fun.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture i may have to try it. you got me thinking about my childhood snack, the popped rice and now i wonder if popped sorghum may not be really good snack. i did not know such thing existed. i have to figure out a place to grow some. i am growing a lot of grains already so i may do a small test plot for now 🙂
I only new about sorghum as a livestock feedcrop, growing up in the Rio Grande Valley. Making syrup with it sounds great! Awesome video. You guys have an amazing set up.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture unfortunately, being forced to move. Landlord passed away and estate just wants to sell property. Trying to move to a friend's home in Colorado, who said I can grow whatever I want, but having a very hard time doing so because of health issues. May end up evicted and on the streets with my two young challenged adult kids. The place in Colorado is in zone 5b, 6a, similar to yours but much dryer, at 6,000 ft. Going to miss this area down here in the Mojave Desert, zone 9B. When I was healthy, I was able to grow pretty much anything I wanted year round. Twice I created a micro climate gorilla Food Forest, that was completely self-sufficient. Didn't even have to buy any food for the small livestock that we kept for eggs and meat, ducks, chickens and rabbits, after just a couple three seasons past. Each time I routed all grey water from the house through a homemade natural filter, so extra water was never an issue after a couple of seasons. But both of those were on rental properties, so you can pretty much guess what happened there, even though a large part of the neighborhood was getting a lot of free, healthy food.
It sounds like you really know how to do a food forest. Is there anyone local who can help you with your move? I wish you health and that you may move to your friend’s with your kids. All the best!
Your videos are wonderfully informative and entertaining. Keep up the great work! Did you do any digging to direct the water flow or it is a natural little stream? We've learned so much! Thanks for sharing your life with the world.
Thank you so much. I talk about this canal in this video: ua-cam.com/video/XEJee-3-rJY/v-deo.htmlsi=j_Oj2_-GN-ursm_A I dug a very little. Just to be able to direct the water, and created the curves. Then, over the past four years, I have been adding organic matter, compost, branches, leaves, etc. Which has raised the curves high above the canal.
I found a box turtle in my garden today. I live fairly close to a lake so I assume that's where he came from. Almost stepped on him! It was a surprise for sure. Thanks for the great video.
All you need is some kind of press (rollers). It flattens the stem and squeezes the juice out, then you process it the way you would maple syrup, but without even close to the amount of boiling necessary. It’s very sweet to begin with.
I know sugarcane sorghum is very popular in the southern states of the US, where there is likely some 9b. Also sorghum is in the same family as the sugarcane in the Caribbean, which is tropical.
I’m sure you will explain this later, during harvest, but I’m not that patient (lol!). When you harvest sorghum for syrup, the seeds will be too immature. If you harvest for the seeds, the cane will be too dried out for syrup extraction. Is this correct? If you want to use sorghum for syrup & seed, you need to plant enough plants to do both uses….is this correct?
In the following video, starting at 37 seconds, you’ll see me harvesting sugarcane from the same spot as I planted last week in this new video. The sugarcane is juicy and sweet and the grain is also ready. Now, if you are growing for commercial production, I suppose an earlier sugarcane harvest for higher juice content % would be better. On the other hand, this stuff is so easy to grow, and you can get so many seeds that you can grow it for the sugarcane and grow some for the grain to harvest later. But even if you harvest later, you’ll still get the sugarcane. ua-cam.com/video/TLhhhdvisak/v-deo.htmlsi=2aq0qeSaeg1fpJ_y
What will eat sorghum seeds? Birds,.... Birds destroyed some of the corns last year so I planted them inside a netting. Thank you God bless you Maranatha
I make sure to plant different native fruiting trees, shrubs and flowers so the animals have food to eat, so they leave my garden alone. Plus the plants I surround the garden with to protect it. Otherwise, might eat some of the sorghum. Maybe squirrels and chipmunks too. God bless you too.
My environment is different from yours. Dry and often cold. So, why do I watch? Because I agree with and like how you interact with your land and all the wild animals that share it with you. I also welcome the snakes. There are frogs but only on our neighbor’s land; there is no water on our property. I think we have many birds because of the energy I spread over the land. At least the wild turkeys seem to feel it. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who views the world in this way.
Thank you for sharing this! There are more of us than you might think, which is great! And I hope to plant a seed with all of these videos. Do you get wild turkeys often on the land? I saw one once, and saw it take off and fly away! Very impressive! It left it's big claw prints in the snow! Thank you for watching!
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture we have a semi-permanent flock of between 6 to 9 turkeys. Turkeys can be aggressive between themselves, especially with dominance fights (which leave feathers and droppings everywhere!). They are so large and noisy that it freaks out the cats. One cowers inside at the sight of them. The other one sits on her side of the garden pen fence, but she is still cautious. The biggest benefit is that the turkeys keep down the numbers of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are a plague in Colorado. Thank you.
That's interesting about the grasshoppers. We have lots turkeys not far from us. We hear them all the time. But only one has come by that we have seen.@@Blackavian
That’s smart! That way, they fall right to the ground! I’m going to try that to see if it works here. Weeds grow really fast here whereas sometimes seeds I plant germinate slowly. The ones I collect germinate a lot more quickly than the ones I buy.
@@WillowsGreenPermacultureI live in northwest Portugal and the climate is very mild in winter but very rainy and hot and dry in summer. The weeds grow like crazy but then, as soon as the warmer July and August days arrive, the sorghum and millets take over. Weeds can't compete with them
That’s funny. The northern water snake stays away. I suppose if you harassed one it would bite. But if it sees a human, it leaves. These ones didn’t in my presence, because they were busy. And I didn’t stick around for more than a minute or two.
Are you in Ontario? I got some from Back Yard Seed Savers, but they don’t operate anymore, and also from Seed Savers Exchange and Fruition Seeds, both in the US. But since 2 years ago, I collect my own seed.
It is also drought tolerant! Actually, that’s an error that I am going to have to correct about the cross-pollination I remembered incorrectly that sorghum is used between varieties of corn so that the varieties of corn don’t cross pollinate with each other. The sorghum creates a wall. So it’s just the opposite.
In this video, I mentioned at 8:33 that sorghum could cross pollinate with corn. It’s actually just the opposite. I was remembering incorrectly something I learned in my first year when planting broomcorn sorghum that I could put the broomcorn sorghum between my varieties of corn in order to make a wall between them so that the varieties of corn wouldn’t cross pollinate.
Excellent info to have!
It's pretty cool Gandalf got into permaculture gardening after defeating Sauron.
😆 haha! Welcome to Willows Green Permaculture! That’s what they do at the Shire! My kid was away for a time after we first set up here and when she came back she said… Wow! It looks like the Shire!
Masanobu Fukuoka would be proud of you. 🙏
Thank you! 🌿
So happy I found you both!
Thank you! I’m so glad you enjoy our videos! 😊
Welcome to Willows Green Permaculture! Thank you for joining us and watching!
Howdy everone! from Texas🤠
Hello from Canada!
For your mosquito issue, you should consider mosquito fish minnows (Gambusia affinis). The are live birth fish, are hardy in a range of temps and oxygen levels and they are excellent eaters of mosquitos and require next to no care or upkeep. They are native to North America. I have them in my small suburban pond in Austin, TX. We've always had horrible mosquitos in the summer. I started off with 20 minnows and now have about 200 in my 400 gallon pond. Since then the mosquitos have been decimated! And my red slider turtles like eating them, as would that cute little snapping turtle! There's a statue of one in Sochi, Russia for solving their malaria problem.
Thank you! I will definitely look into that!@@huehuecoyotl2
A homesteading wizard told us to plant sorghum, and so we will.
Thank you Shireland Farm! 🍂🧙♂️
Fun to see the chinampas idea in miniature. I never spray or pull poison ivy but I also don't support it, it doesn't need my help. I smother it with chop\drop whenever I see it, it has slowly weakened a powerful patch on a hillside garden over the years.
Thank you for the tip. I covered some in a thick layer of woodchips in the garden, a tiny patch, and it still survived. A real vine. I’m going to have to pull it as soon as the ground thaws, because it’s inside our garden.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture Yeah, I've never killed a vine this way. Just kept it from spreading out of it's area and diminished that boundary a bit. I'm curious about having someone bring some goats through it, they love eating it.
@@HoboGardenerBenyes, Ive read that. But they’ll eat everything else too! 😊 It might work if it’s all you have. I don’t know if the goats pull your roots first you. I doubt it. So you’d have to have them back a number of times. We have poison ivy because the dear eat it. And they eat the fruit in winter and spread it.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture That'd be funny to try to use goats to eliminate a patch and they just end up spreading the seeda with their poop like the deer :)
@@HoboGardenerBen yup. 😊 Very hard to check if there’s no fruit because they’re half the size of peas, and a pale cream colour. Easy to miss.
i really envy all that water. i had to make many underground cisterns for rainwater here in n. idaho. i am totally in love with your place 🙂
Thank you Alsan. This year especially we have lots of water with all the rain. It’s a good thing we did the canals and the culvert, because we may have had severe erosion if we hadn’t done it. It was a great learning experience and particularly satisfying seeing the successful results.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture it is amazing how lucky we are with our approach to life. you balance a wet property, and i have balanced a dry one. makes all that work worth it for us old guys 🙂
@@AlsanPineyes it does! 😊
Always wonderful to see you both out doing what you love. Wish more people would understand how important it is to leave room for nature. The mustard is flowering and green beans are to the top of cattle panels & nastrum flowers are blooming here. Take care
Wow! You’re always about a month ahead of me. All that should be happening by the end of June here! 😊
Excellent i've learned so much from your wisdom!
Thank you! ❤
Thank you. I like turtles.
They’re the best!
love sorghum. i grow the seed varieties though as it is one of my staple grains. i have been tempted to experiment with the syrup sorghum. it takes so much work to process the syrup though!
Yes. Like maple syrup, except even more. I do like to chew on the stem hearts though. This year, I added a variety. Popping sorghum - a seed variety. I got that from Fruition Seeds in NY, if I recall correctly.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture i have heard about that. let me know how it goes, i may try that next year. i don't eat popcorn but when i was young i used to love popped rice so sorghum may be fun.
@@AlsanPineI’m not actually getting it to pop it. But seeing as it’s popping sorghum, I’m figuring it should be a good sized grain.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture i may have to try it. you got me thinking about my childhood snack, the popped rice and now i wonder if popped sorghum may not be really good snack. i did not know such thing existed. i have to figure out a place to grow some. i am growing a lot of grains already so i may do a small test plot for now 🙂
Sorghum seems to do fine almost anywhere. It's in the big grass family, after all.
Good night from Brazil
Hello from Canada!
I only new about sorghum as a livestock feedcrop, growing up in the Rio Grande Valley. Making syrup with it sounds great! Awesome video. You guys have an amazing set up.
Thank you so much!
You're living my dream brother.🤗♥️
Thank you! Do you plant anything?
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture unfortunately, being forced to move. Landlord passed away and estate just wants to sell property. Trying to move to a friend's home in Colorado, who said I can grow whatever I want, but having a very hard time doing so because of health issues. May end up evicted and on the streets with my two young challenged adult kids.
The place in Colorado is in zone 5b, 6a, similar to yours but much dryer, at 6,000 ft.
Going to miss this area down here in the Mojave Desert, zone 9B. When I was healthy, I was able to grow pretty much anything I wanted year round.
Twice I created a micro climate gorilla Food Forest, that was completely self-sufficient. Didn't even have to buy any food for the small livestock that we kept for eggs and meat, ducks, chickens and rabbits, after just a couple three seasons past. Each time I routed all grey water from the house through a homemade natural filter, so extra water was never an issue after a couple of seasons. But both of those were on rental properties, so you can pretty much guess what happened there, even though a large part of the neighborhood was getting a lot of free, healthy food.
It sounds like you really know how to do a food forest. Is there anyone local who can help you with your move? I wish you health and that you may move to your friend’s with your kids. All the best!
Nice work!
Thank you!
Stephan muchas gracias por hacer un video del sorgo cultivo y sus aplicaciones!!!! Un fuerte abrazo desde Uruguay.
¡Gracias Loreley!
Your videos are wonderfully informative and entertaining. Keep up the great work! Did you do any digging to direct the water flow or it is a natural little stream? We've learned so much! Thanks for sharing your life with the world.
Thank you so much. I talk about this canal in this video: ua-cam.com/video/XEJee-3-rJY/v-deo.htmlsi=j_Oj2_-GN-ursm_A
I dug a very little. Just to be able to direct the water, and created the curves. Then, over the past four years, I have been adding organic matter, compost, branches, leaves, etc. Which has raised the curves high above the canal.
I found a box turtle in my garden today. I live fairly close to a lake so I assume that's where he came from. Almost stepped on him! It was a surprise for sure. Thanks for the great video.
Wow, beautiful! Thank you!
So wonderful! My dream life!
Thank you! ❤
Very good ideas,thank you for sharing ❤
Thank you! ❤️
I would love to see the processing to use sorgum as a sugar source! I never knew that we could grow a sweet source in canada that arent sugar beets!
All you need is some kind of press (rollers). It flattens the stem and squeezes the juice out, then you process it the way you would maple syrup, but without even close to the amount of boiling necessary. It’s very sweet to begin with.
Have you guys ever made syrup from it?
Not yet. I would like to get a press to extract the juice. It’s the most efficient way.
Thank you… I really enjoy watching your videos. New subscribers from California. I enjoy watching wildlife also❤
Thank you! Every chance I get, I’ll put the wildlife in! Welcome to Willows Green Permaculture!
I'm planting Mennonite sorghum for grain and syrup
That’s great!
What can I grow in shaded forest wetland?
How would you described the sun that gets through? What are you hoping to grow? Native plants, or food? Or both?
Frogs & snappers are good food. You want to keep a lot of them ariund.
Thank you! They sure are. We surrounded our main garden with logs to attract them in.
Will sorghum grow well in zone 9B?
I know sugarcane sorghum is very popular in the southern states of the US, where there is likely some 9b. Also sorghum is in the same family as the sugarcane in the Caribbean, which is tropical.
Just curious where is your land?
In Ontario, Canada. About a half hour north of Lake Ontario.
I’m sure you will explain this later, during harvest, but I’m not that patient (lol!). When you harvest sorghum for syrup, the seeds will be too immature. If you harvest for the seeds, the cane will be too dried out for syrup extraction. Is this correct? If you want to use sorghum for syrup & seed, you need to plant enough plants to do both uses….is this correct?
In the following video, starting at 37 seconds, you’ll see me harvesting sugarcane from the same spot as I planted last week in this new video. The sugarcane is juicy and sweet and the grain is also ready. Now, if you are growing for commercial production, I suppose an earlier sugarcane harvest for higher juice content % would be better. On the other hand, this stuff is so easy to grow, and you can get so many seeds that you can grow it for the sugarcane and grow some for the grain to harvest later. But even if you harvest later, you’ll still get the sugarcane.
ua-cam.com/video/TLhhhdvisak/v-deo.htmlsi=2aq0qeSaeg1fpJ_y
What will eat sorghum seeds? Birds,.... Birds destroyed some of the corns last year so I planted them inside a netting. Thank you God bless you Maranatha
I make sure to plant different native fruiting trees, shrubs and flowers so the animals have food to eat, so they leave my garden alone. Plus the plants I surround the garden with to protect it. Otherwise, might eat some of the sorghum. Maybe squirrels and chipmunks too. God bless you too.
My environment is different from yours. Dry and often cold. So, why do I watch? Because I agree with and like how you interact with your land and all the wild animals that share it with you. I also welcome the snakes. There are frogs but only on our neighbor’s land; there is no water on our property. I think we have many birds because of the energy I spread over the land. At least the wild turkeys seem to feel it. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who views the world in this way.
Thank you for sharing this! There are more of us than you might think, which is great! And I hope to plant a seed with all of these videos. Do you get wild turkeys often on the land? I saw one once, and saw it take off and fly away! Very impressive! It left it's big claw prints in the snow! Thank you for watching!
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture we have a semi-permanent flock of between 6 to 9 turkeys. Turkeys can be aggressive between themselves, especially with dominance fights (which leave feathers and droppings everywhere!). They are so large and noisy that it freaks out the cats. One cowers inside at the sight of them. The other one sits on her side of the garden pen fence, but she is still cautious. The biggest benefit is that the turkeys keep down the numbers of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are a plague in Colorado. Thank you.
That's interesting about the grasshoppers. We have lots turkeys not far from us. We hear them all the time. But only one has come by that we have seen.@@Blackavian
I do it even more simple. I spread tge seeds before I cut the "weeds" ( usualy a mixtures of legu es and cereal) and then I cut the weeds. That's all.
That’s smart! That way, they fall right to the ground! I’m going to try that to see if it works here. Weeds grow really fast here whereas sometimes seeds I plant germinate slowly. The ones I collect germinate a lot more quickly than the ones I buy.
@@WillowsGreenPermacultureI live in northwest Portugal and the climate is very mild in winter but very rainy and hot and dry in summer.
The weeds grow like crazy but then, as soon as the warmer July and August days arrive, the sorghum and millets take over. Weeds can't compete with them
Same here. The sorghum tolerates the dryer weather.
I think the snapping turtle, water snake, and wasabi are all alike because they all….bite.
That’s funny. The northern water snake stays away. I suppose if you harassed one it would bite. But if it sees a human, it leaves. These ones didn’t in my presence, because they were busy. And I didn’t stick around for more than a minute or two.
I never knew Sorghum could grow around here. Where did you get the seed?
Are you in Ontario? I got some from Back Yard Seed Savers, but they don’t operate anymore, and also from Seed Savers Exchange and Fruition Seeds, both in the US. But since 2 years ago, I collect my own seed.
@@WillowsGreenPermaculture yes, I am, & not far from you, I believe
What part of Ontario?@@suemee1328
Heritage Harvest Seeds (Manitoba) and Richter’s Herbs (Ontario) both sell sorghum seed.
Thank you!
I didn't know that sorghum liked it wet nor that it would cross pollinate with corn
It is also drought tolerant! Actually, that’s an error that I am going to have to correct about the cross-pollination I remembered incorrectly that sorghum is used between varieties of corn so that the varieties of corn don’t cross pollinate with each other. The sorghum creates a wall. So it’s just the opposite.
You can grow something else besides a plant in a wet spot !!!!😁😆😂🤣
🤔I don’t get it. ???