"It's like Strip the Willow: but with less skipping..."

... and with more blood.

"What?!" I hear you say.

I'm talking about what is normally an annual, winter, job: the Stripping of the Sugar Cane in my own back garden.

This wonderful plant is Miscanthus sacchariflorus, common name Sugar Cane, although in the UK, it doesn't produce any sort of sugar. 

It's a fantastic ornamental grass - yes, despite being over 6-8' tall, it is actually a grass - which makes a really nice screen in the garden: it rustles in the wind, which is very soothing, and it forms a visual screen without being a solid, heavy, sort of thing.

In recent years, I've noticed it being grown for biomass fuel, which is an interesting development. 

There are several fields of it in Baulking, a nearby village, which always catch my eye if I'm out that way. It grows fast and tall, and is cut down to the ground every winter, does not require replanting (because it is a perennial) does not require weedkiller (as it does not seem to suffer from any pests or diseases, plus the dense foliage and thick rootstocks prevent most weeds from growing beneath it) and grows pretty much anywhere, making it a good choice for what is called "marginal" agricultural land, ie land which is not particularly fertile. It's also drought-tolerant, and can withstand a fair amount of winter abuse, ie cold temperatures and soggy ground don't seem to bother it. Sounds like a win-win for the farmers, and it's a lovely crop to walk alongside, as it doesn't produce pollen, or dust, or any other irritants.

In fact, the only bad thing about it is that the leaves are very finely toothed - serrulate, if you would like the technical term - and can slash bare skin with ease, if you rub up against it the wrong way.

And that leads up back to the blood... every autumn, the leaves die off, so at some point I go round it and remove the dead leaves. Some years, this is all done in one day: in other years, the leaves die off slowly, so I might do it in several instalments.

The beauty of removing the leaves as they die is that a) dead leaves are unsightly, and b) the newly revealed bare stems then change colour, over a couple of weeks, from pale green to red or purple, depending on the weather.

On a good year, I'll end up with a stand of reddish/purple stems, still bearing a tuft of green leaves at the top, in late autumn. Then those top leaves will die off slowly over the winter, and by February they are looking sad and brown, so I'll strip them off completely, and cut down the bare stems.

Which, incidentally, provides me with an annual crop of light-weight canes, for use in the garden.

Other years, the leaves will all die off by the end of autumn, so they get stripped at that point, although I often leave the bare stems, if they are still colourful, until they lose their colour, at which point I'll cut them all down. 

And this year, here we are in mid August, and already I've had to go out and start stripping them!

 

This is what they looked like, yesterday: a mass of dead brown leaves.

Bear in mind that these are only the lower leaves, the top one are green and lush as always (*rushes outside to take picture of the whole stand*)

 

 

 

There you go - right - that's what they look like today, with added water butts:   you can see that, despite the recent weather, it's well above the fence height!

But the lower leaves are all dying off, which spoils the look of it, so it's time to Strip the Sugar Cane!

This means pushing my way in amongst the stems, and taking each leaf in turn, and pulling it gently off the stem.

It's immensely satisfying to do, because after ten minutes or so, you start to see visible progress, as the newly-revealed stems are a clear green, instead of that nasty old dead brown stuff.

Here we go - left - and you can see that it's turning back to a green plant again, instead of a brown one. There are still quite a few to go, but it's too hot to spend much time out there, so I'll do a bit more tomorrow.

Now, getting back to the blood... normally, as mentioned, I do this job in autumn, or in the depths of winter, when I am well bundled up against the cold.

I don't "normally" have to do it in summer.

So here I am, in shorts and t-shirt, pushing my way in among the stems, bending right over to get the lower ones - you have to start at the bottom and work your way up, because of the architecture of the leaves: each leaf has a long sheath below it, which wraps all the way round the stem, and each leaf sheath overlaps the leaf above.  I'm not sure if that explanation made sense, but take my word for it, you start at the bottom and work up.

This means bending double.... and that means that the leaves slide past your arms, as you reach down.

The leaves.

With those serrulate margins.

Teeth.

Sharp.

T-shirt.

OUCH!!  

After twenty minutes, my upper arms were starting to sting, and when I went back indoors, I noticed a matrix of thin slashes. 

Hmmm.  Memo to self: wait until it's cooler, then put on long sleeves before finishing this job!

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