By Pamela and Frank Arnosky

These are challenging times to be a flower grower. Sure, gas prices are up, imports are up, global warming is up and on and on. But these problems are nothing compared to our latest crisis. Martha’s new color is gray. Yep, gray is her new chartreuse. She bought a new house and redecorated in shades of gray, and now she is telling everyone else to follow suit. This does not bode well for those of us in the flower bid’ness. What goes with gray? White? Black? Other shades of gray? We spend most of our time trying to prevent flowers from going gray! Now what?
In the meantime, we will keep riding the chartreuse wave. It takes a while for new trends to filter down to the proletariat classes, and secretly we are hoping they’ll toss out the gray thing as being too… gray.
We have had no trouble at all selling green this year. One of our best sellers has been ornamental sorghum. This tall, warm season grass comes in a myriad of shapes, sizes and colors. Many types are attractive as a green seed head. Sorghum originated in Africa, and has been used by humans for eons. As such, it has been developed into many useful varieties. Milo is widely grown here in Texas as an animal feed. It is a short plant with a thick head of red seeds. Ribbon cane has been grown for generations in the South as a source of cane syrup. Ranchers have developed several sorghum strains that are planted for forage and hay. Known as Haygrazer or Sudangrass, these varieties have the ability to germinate with a small bit of rain, and then wait out drought as a small plant, shooting up to six feet tall with a good rain. They can produce an amazing amount of biomass in a very short time. Then there is broom corn, grown mostly in Mexico. Yes, the brooms we all use are made from the flower heads of sorghum.
But there are also many ornamental varieties of sorghum. Several years ago, we were visiting the Germania Seed Company booth at a trade show. In the middle of a conversation, Frank looked over to a display of White Popping Sorghum and lost his train of thought. “What is that?” he had to ask. This had the look of a winner, and we had to try it. Since then, we have experimented with a number of varieties, and the market response has been very good.
As we mentioned before, this is a warm season grass, and shouldn’t be planted before the soil warms up. Its culture is very similar to field corn, and in the early stages, it is very hard to tell the plants apart. Once it germinates, growth is very rapid. Some varieties will grow up to 14 feet tall in 3 months!
Seed is hard, round, and about 1/8th inch in diameter. Being a grain, it is relatively inexpensive. The seed can be direct-seeded or started as transplants. It can be grown fairly crowded, and we grow four rows in a four-foot wide bed. Thin the plants to about one foot apart. They will quickly grow into a thick, tropical-looking hedgerow.
Because it is such a fast grower, sorghum is a heavy feeder. Prepare your bed as you would for a crop of corn. We use cottonseed meal as our fertilizer, and we put 50 pounds on a 4 x 200 foot bed, or about 1 pound per 16 square feet of bed. Then step back and watch it grow!
We have had very few pest problems with our sorghum. The biggest problem has been grasshoppers, but they are a problem on everything here. They really like to eat the coarse fibers in the leaves and can really chew them up. We put out Nolo Bait every year to control them, but there are always some, and when they go after the sorghum, we just remove the tattered leaves before packing. Once in a while we’ll get some aphids down in the growing point, but the plants seem to outgrow them without our intervention.
Depending on the variety, the plants can get really tall. and you may want to use Tenax netting to support them. The seed heads get very heavy before harvest. We don’t net ours, but just the other day, we had a severe storm, and a lot of stems blew over. (It’s OK! We need rain so badly, we’ll take whatever we can get!) Luckily, it was near the end of the season, and we just went out and cut them all.
You can pinch the plants to keep them shorter. This will give you more, but smaller, seed heads. Wait until the plants are about 3 feet tall, and be sure to cut low enough in the crown that you actually remove the growing point. Otherwise it will just send up another leaf from the cut stump and keep on growing. Pinched plants will send up shoots from the base of the plant, and these stems make great fall bouquet material.
With the many colors and forms of sorghum, there are lots of options for harvesting. We cut many varieties at the green stage (still surfing on Martha’s green wave!), but you can also wait for the seeds to color up. The main consideration is that you must be sure to wait until the pollen is shed. Some varieties, like White Popping, will look good when immature , but when you get it in the house, it will release huge amounts of pollen, sending sensitive clients into shock! With experience, you will see when this stage is past. Watch for the dangling little yellow anthers, and wait for them to fall.
Although it is tempting to pile the large, strong stems into a pickup bed as you cut, be sure to cut directly into water or hydrating solution. The leaves quickly desiccate out of water, and it is impossible to get them to re-hydrate.
We cut the stems about 3 1/2 to 4 feet long, which sometimes requires us to reach way up to cut! We put the stems immediately into 5-gallon buckets, and pack the stems back at the shed. Bunches are either 3- or 5-stem bunches, depending on the size of the seed head, and we sell that for $3.65 wholesale. Vase life is very long, and the mature heads can be used as a dried flower, although as a grain, you’ll have to watch for pests in the dried seed head.
Seed is available as a series of mixes, or as straight varieties. We avoid the mixes because there is such variation in height and maturity dates, and the mixes really do get “mixed-up” Seed is available from many sources. Germania (800-380-4721) has a nice selection, including the White Popping sorghum that first caught our eye. And yes, it supposedly does pop, although we haven’t tried it yet!

Here are some of our best varieties:

Hegari. This is a relatively short variety (6 feet) with club-shaped, tight seed heads. The immature seeds are a bright chartreuse green, and then the seed matures to a bright white with a clearly defined black line under the seed. It is really cool, and may be the only plant we know of that will work in Martha’s new gray world. It also does very well in the past realm of green! This has sold very well this season.

Egyptian Wheat Sorghum. This is a tall one. It has a moderately tight seed head, though looser than Hegari. It can be sold green, but there is a point in its maturity where the seed are black, but the underside is still bright green. Way cool! People love it at this stage.

White Popping Sorghum. This is our main variety. It is also tall, with a loose, open seed head that looks like a very refined Johnson Grass (In a good way)! The color is a clean light green, and the seed matures to white with a light pinkish blush. Production is very uniform.

Red Broom Corn. Like the name implies, this variety has long, fibrous seed heads that can be used in brooms. You can cut this green, but we find it is best to wait until the seeds mature to a shiny amber-red. This one shatters more easily than the others, however, so don’t let it get fully mature. Some individual plants have seed heads that grow with a full 180 degree bend at the base. At first we thought people wouldn’t want that, but it has been very popular.

Texas Black. This tall variety has long, somewhat loose seed heads with very shiny black seeds. They look like they’ve been polished. Another good candidate to decorate Martha’s new kitchen! When pinched, this variety grows nice-sized, small heads that look great in bouquets.

We have found these sorghums to be a very good item with high-end markets such as florists with big hotel lobby accounts. We sell a lot of stems in the River Oaks district of Houston, home of Big Oil. We have even had a request to cut the stems very tall. We cut them at about 7 feet tall. Really cool, but a shipping headache. The seed heads are heavy, and it is hard to keep them upright at that height. Nonetheless, they were a big hit. Let Martha have her gray. We’ll do our best to help her out, and when she’s ready, we’ll be here with a big, bright bunch of zinnias. s

Pamela and Frank Arnosky are the owners of Texas Specialty Cut Flowers in Blanco, Texas. They produce 20 acres of cut flowers, which they market to supermarkets, natural foods stores, florists, and direct to the public at their own farm market.