hey everybody it's a sunny Sunday afternoon in October in South Carolina this is a great time for me to go ahead and plant the sugarcane you might be wondering what I'm gonna be doing with sugarcane well aside from extracting the juice you could basically cut a little piece and then take the outer part off and then this inside here is for chewing you cut off a piece like this and then you to the chew it and then spit out the pulp mmm-hmm just sweeter soda then you usually just spit that to the ground now sugar cane is a grass it's a really tall woody grass and basically what you want to do when you get your hands on this if you can find some is you want to cut the leafy end off and then you want to make sure that they have these nice buds the buds right here at the nodes that's where next year's growth is going to start from and then what you want to do is till up some dirt you see that I got a couple nice rows all prepared here and go ahead and fertilize it I'm using about 1 pound of fertilizer for every 10 feet of row and then what I'm gonna do is work that fertilizer into the dirt and make myself a little shallow trench maybe about three four inches deep once you get these stocks lined up as straight as you can in the row then you're just gonna come along with your rake and cover these back up with dirt you want it nice and burned up you don't want them sitting in water and October is a good time to plant them in the south and then next year these are going to sprout and they'll be you know eight feet high and we'll just repeat the cycle year after year I know you guys probably have some questions like what states will sugarcane grow in think the deep south or Hawaii so Florida Texas Louisiana South Carolina Georgia I know a few people in North Carolina who grow it with variable results and as far as where you can get sugarcane you pretty much have to get it locally from roadside farmers markets or if you know somebody who's growing it see if you can cut some and then finally what can you do with sugarcane well aside from just fresh eating really just as a novelty you could squeeze the juice out there's various presses available and you could do whatever you want with the juice you could ferment it and then distill it and make rum or you could mix it 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline and make your own e85 automobile fuel you know that Henry Ford originally designed cars to be run on ethanol ideally what the farmer would grow himself and so sugarcane has a big potential in the world I'm just trying it small-scale here and I'll keep you posted on how it does