Summer Kitchen to Greenhouse Project Days 4-6: Ripping the Roof Off.

Another few days of working on the greenhouse. Got some more windows, got some plastic panels, and ripped the roof off. Actually making some progress despite the cold.

Self Sufficient Gardening Guide: Part 4, Sugar Crops

Sugar Crops: The sweet stuff, in all reality sugar is important due to its ability to aid in preserving food (there’s a reason it’s in jam and jellies) to ferment into alcohol/ethanol as a culinary aid and perhaps most importantly as a trade good. People everywhere love sugar, it’s hardwired into human’s brains and as such it naturally has a place on this list.

Sorghum: A popular sugar crop in the southern US. It grows tall stalks which can be cut down at maturity and pressed to create a sugar rich juice. This juice can be boiled down to create syrup and further boiled down to produce a brown sugar like substance. An acre of sweet sorghum can produce roughly 400gallons of syrup or roughly 8.8 gallons per 1000 square feet. That’s roughly a 7 to 1 ratio for how much sap to boil  down to syrup. At 11.6 lbs per gallon, that’s roughly 102 pounds of sweet syrup per 1000 square feet.

Agave: A massive perennial plant that requires next to no irrigation and can yield an impressive bounty of crops. The downside is that many of the sweet varieties of agave used for making sweeteners or for making tequila can take 7-10 years to reach full maturity. Additionally these plants grow to be tall and wide 5-8 feet tall and 7-12 feet wide, so spacing these out will be necessary. Once this plant grows to be properly mature the “head” can be harvested though care will need to be taken as these can reach up to 100lbs. Though anywhere from 25%-33% of this content can be sugars. Finding yield values but according to a source listed for turning agave into biofuel, a hectare of agave harvested on a 6 year cycle and planted on a 6x6ft grid will yield 7,500 liters per hectare. That’s roughly equal to 107 liters of ethanol per 1000 square feet. Or roughly 18.5 gallons of ethanol. Considering it takes 10-14 pounds of sugars to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, we can conclude agave should yield roughly 222 pounds of sugar per 1000 square feet. An impressive figure, shame it takes 6 years to harvest though.

Sugar Beets: Not just for making references to the office. Sugar beets are different from the regular red variety found in many cans and gardens worldwide, they’re instead a whitish color, weigh 2-5lbs and are roughly 18% sucralose (or sugar) a great crop for making sugar or syrups. Sugar Beets produce roughly 8500-11000lbs per acre or an average of about 227lbs per 1000 square feet. And according to a single how to guide I could find, roughly 30lbs per 90 square feet. That same guide stated that they could produce roughly 10lbs of beets into 1lb of sugar using home kitchen tools. Based on this it may be fair to assume that something close to every 100square feet of beets can produce 3lbs of sugar once processed. Also note, the greens to the beets can be eaten regularly and are said to taste similar to swiss chard.

Tree Sap Syrups: Not just for sugar maples, though they are the most popular. Tree saps that can be boiled down include practically every maple variety that have a sap to syrup ratio of 40 to 1. Birch tree varieties that have a sugar to sap ratio of 100 to 1. Walnut/butternut tree varieties have a sugar to sap ratio of 40 to 1, but only produce roughly a third the sap of maples.  There are several other varieties like ironwood and sycamore that can be tapped as well. While it may not be much syrup per tree, it is free sugar if these trees can be harvested. Well free other than having to go around drilling holes, carrying buckets of sap, and boiling said sap down to practically nothing. But other than that, it's free. Based on a result I’ve dug up for maple trees, expect one 16oz container of maple syrup once evaporated down, per mature tree per year.

Fruit Syrups: Fruit syrups are just a matter of taking any sugar rich fruit which may or may not be about to expire, and cooking it down to paste (such as turning apples into apple butter). It’s easy to make, just a matter of cooking down the fruit in a large stock pot with a thin layer of water at the bottom so the fruit cooks and doesn’t burn. Cook this down until it has the consistency of honey and jar it for long term use. Easy to try, if it’s not to your taste make ordinary jam with added sugar instead. 

Honey: A product of all bees, but the best producer is the honeybee. A standard Hive can produce 30-60lbs of honey a year, and a thriving hive can produce up to 100lbs of honey per great year. This sounds amazing but it’s important to remember that bees need much of that honey themselves to survive the winter. So take the excess but leave much of the stores for the bees so they can make it through winter. Bees are fantastic for numerous reasons, they provide wax which has loads of uses from candlemaking to soap, expect 2-4 lbs of excess wax per hive per year.The bees will also do all the pollination work of a garden, so any crops that require pollination (such as nearly all fruit and vegetable crops) will be pollinated more efficiently allowing them to produce a heavier crop. Additionally since many people use honey to make mead, it takes between 2 to 3 pounds of honey to produce one gallon of mead.