The Fastest Growing Plant I Have Ever Grown | Sorghum Sudangrass Cover Crop

this plant right here is probably the fastest growing plant that i have ever personally grown today you're going to find out why i'm growing it what it is and how you can grow it coming up thanks for watching the video today i'm diego d-i-e-g-o and when i first got into gardening i heard joel salatin tell this story of the early settlers that came into the shenandoah valley on the east coast virginia i believe and they could tie knots in the grass by sitting on the horse's back the grass was that tall so imagine grass over your head well fast forward ahead a little bit and i visited my good friend charles mayfield and i saw a johnson grass that was literally over my head i thought this is crazy this is insane this is an anomaly and now here i am in the land where there isn't any grass southern california and i have grass that's over the top of my head this is sorghum sudan grass and in terms of a biomass producing cover crop it is insane off the charts fastest growing plant i've ever grown this plant was planted how many weeks ago do you think this was eight nine ten twelve and none of the above six six weeks ago i planted this and no doubt i think this plant is growing over 12 inches a week that's 12 inches a week here on october 10th when we have cooler nights cooler days and day length is going down i can't imagine how much this would grow over the summer so by far fastest growing plant that i've ever grown so that's great that though you know we're not making a guinness book of worlds record attempt here why would i actually be growing this well i'm growing it because sorghum sudan grass is an amazing cover crop it puts a lot of biomass above ground obviously a lot of this above ground biomass is echoed and reversed underground and it's also putting a lot of root exit liquid carbon into the soil as these leaves harvest sugars send them down the plant put them into the root and pump them out in the soil to feed microbes so you get three amazing things happening with cover crops like this massive above ground biomass massive below ground biomass and a lot of root exudate entering the soil to feed microbes add those all up combine them and you get a crop that can break up soil and build soil really fast just to give you a better look at the crop i pulled up one of the plants now this is one seed and this is like a bunch grass probably not the technical correct biological term it's just what it looks like you get a bunch of grasses from one seed so this isn't like 10 seeds went into one hole one seed and you get all these little stalks coming up and if i put this on the ground like it's on the ground right now and hi i'm somewhere in here so you get a massive amount of thick stocked biomass and then here's what your root looks like so you get really thin roots at the bottom while the upper part of the plant and kind of the base support roots look a lot like corn when you start to pull it up you get real fibrous roots i think they're thinner roots than corn but this is really what we're after under the soil put as much of these roots as we can under the soil let them feed the microbes and leave the roots in there at the end of the day but just an amazing amazing fast-growing plant currently the sorghum sudan grass is planted where i was growing potatoes over the summer when i was harvesting those potatoes i felt like the ground had a compaction layer in it not necessarily from my activity but from just how i've built these beds up above the soil surface and i wanted to try and break that up also the soil felt a little tight it felt hard and i wanted to put a crop in here that could bust this up that's why i planted sorghum soon and grass still some potatoes actually growing under there that look like they're doing pretty well given that i've never grown sorghum sudan grass before i'm not really sure how high it can get i've heard it can grow 10 to 12 feet tall believe it or not i mean that's insane but i don't want it to get anywhere near that high because when it starts getting near its ultimate height what else is going to happen in the biological process it's going to start to form a seed head and i don't want that i don't want this plant to go to seed and i really don't want it to stop growing so to cut or not to cut in order to answer that question we really have to start with asking another question why are you growing the crop in the first place because depending on your answer to why you're growing it you may or may not want to cut it now and this goes for a lot of cover crops at least the ones that can regrow so grasses like sorghum sudan grass if you cut them they'll regrow crops like mustard once you cut them they're not coming back so but when you have grasses you have to say what's the point here what am i trying to do well in my case i'm trying to do a few things one i'm trying to put as much root exudate into the soil as possible meaning i want these plants to harvest as much sunlight as they can biologically convert it into liquid sugars and push that into the soil so microbes can flourish and that microbial community can just go through the roof and go up as high and count hopefully as high as these plants go above surface i also want as many roots in the soil as possible not just because that means more exudates are going in soil but these plants have very fine roots and they're fibrous roots they're dense and i want those roots to just go out into the soil and just bust up clods to break new layers if there is any compaction in my beds i want them to try and push through it and if you think about the end of this plant's life cycle when i eventually want this plant out of here what's going to happen well eventually i'm going to terminate it probably by just cutting it off its surface all those roots that i grew over the past few months will just remain in the soil so for me this is a long-term thing i don't want the plant to go to see it i don't want the plant to terminate i want the plant to be in soil as much as possible for as long as possible until i need this bed again because when it's in soil it's working for me really for free putting roots and root exudates into the soil and giving me mulch and compost feedstock above surface so there's no hurry to kill this and i'm just going to actually try and speed it up and enhance its growth by cutting it back because when i cut it back it's going to think it was grazed by some sort of animal and it's going to want to shoot back up and say i need to try and reproduce so let's mechanically graze this right now so when you cut the plant what can you do with them well i've done a whole bunch of videos on this and there's really a few options number one you can just chop and drop cut the plant and put it on the soil surface two you could take it and you could maybe dry it out and use it for a carbon source and compost later maybe you could feed it to animals and use it as a hay source you could also use it as a compost feedstock or some sort of bedding for your animals so there's a lot of options in my case i'm going to be doing chop and drop i'm just going to cut it and put it on soil surface where it is why that option well i don't really need any more compost to be made right now i have a lot of composting projects happening so i don't need that so i'm just going to mulch the soil surface and it looks like that's going to be the easiest route and i'm kind of in a hurry today so i'm just going to be chopping and dropping in terms of cutting it cuts really easy kind of feels like celery or green onion and consistency i have three rows on a 30 inch bed right here i was hoping i could just lay a bunch of this down the center that's not happening so i'm just gonna have to try and mix and match and kind of tetris my way down the aisle putting this wherever i can on the soil surface looking at it three rows on a 30 inch bed is probably too tight i think if i ever did it again i would just do two rows on a 30 inch bed if you think about this in terms of dry weight most of it's going to go away it's going to go back up into the atmosphere and what remains goes back into the soil may say well i'm losing it all to the atmosphere well that's okay because where did this come from in the first place it came from the atmosphere so we're just sending it back up there but we've kept all that carbon below soil in the form of exudates which have fed microbes and roots so we've leveraged this equation we've taken from the atmosphere we've put stuff in the soil to store we're going to keep a little bit of it from here and we'll give some of it back so enjoy it help us again one thing i've noticed whenever i bring up cover crops is people tend to say how much is the seed glass how much is the seed cost and that's a fair question but i feel like i've answered this in almost every video that i've done about cover crops seed cost when it comes to growing cover crops on a garden scale is negligible meaning it's basically zero think about this this is a bag of seed of sorghum sedan grass that i planted right here this is a five pound bag it was fifteen dollars for five pounds three dollars a pound and i am using like a teaspoon in one of these beds this one bag will last me years and years and years so if i try and take three dollars a pound and divide that by a hundred what am i at three cents a bed it is essentially nothing on a large-scale farm if you were grazer and you wanted to plant cover crops on your land or you're a row crop farmer and you had 5 000 acres cover crops are a significant potential expense especially in margins or thin on a garden scale when this is a hobby 15 in seed that might last you kind of a lifetime it's a non-expense and if you're wondering where i got these seeds from i got them right here from seed ranch you can check them out i found them they didn't find me there's no paid advertising here i just really like this seed so i'm giving them a plug seed ranch is where i got my store from sedan grass seeds i'll link to them below no affiliate link or anything i just like the seed there we have it the row is cut cut actually really easy like i said probably cutting celery green onions that consistency no smell like onions no smell like brassicas is which is one thing i hate when you're growing mustard they smell when you cut them and they really smell when they decompose this is just a grass i layered it up on the ground it's not so thick it's going to have that anaerobic smell i don't think we'll see but it was basically just a ground mulch around the plants and i think it's a really cool concept to have a plant that can mulch itself i mean there's not a lot of plants that we grow in the garden that do that where you can chop them down feed the soil cool the soil cover the soil below them and then have them keep growing pretty cool concept so sorghum sudan grass in the garden i love the idea of it i'll keep you updated on this regrowth process if you want to get more frequent updates check me out on instagram diego footer and you can see more frequent pictures versus videos but i will measure this regrowth and we'll get to see you know how much does this actually grow at this time of year how fast is it growing if you have any questions about anything i've done in this video please leave them in the comments below happy to answer them and if you've never tried growing sorghum sedan grass think about growing it next year or maybe right now depending on where you're at in the world thanks for watching the video until next time be nice be thankful and do the work you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 124,638

Keywords: Sorghum, sorghumsudan grass, cover crop, composting

Id: KbY8X9LnDYo

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020