Sorghum: An Ancient Relative pt 3
November 14, 2025
the following is a repost of this year’s grant reports shared with Going to Seed, a national non-profit focused on supporting landrace gardening. They were generous enough to support our sorghum breeding project for 3 years, 2024-2026.
End of year update! So we harvested all the sorghum that survived, about 8 of the 16 in total.
Our sorghum field at harvest time. You can see Dominique in the field, and a calabash of freshly harvested sesame plants is visible.
Things were lookin sad and scraggly, and the birds got to some of it, so these are truly the most prolific survivors of what was a pretty bad California drought. They grew shorter than I hoped (lots of the easily visible stands in these pics are sweet corn, which survived far better than the black eyed peas in the intercrop), but that’s in quite a dry condition, so next year they’ll get a bit more moisture (we plan to up the mulch/intercropping, which was a bit of a fail this year) and hopefully get tall enough to support some African peas.
A selection of sorghums harvested from the field. A variety of colors, including red, black, white and yellow, are shown.
We have a good variety of colors and sizes, tho the red-seeded ones seemed to perform better overall.
Basket of seeds harvested in this year's field. Half of these were given to Going to Seed to share out, the other half were saved for our planting, and for sharing with our friends.
Also the stands that are leftover from harvest are still growing and producing seed, so perhaps perenniality will be easier to select for than I thought (at least in my climate). This next year we’ll set out to grow enough for taste-testing, and select more heavily for ease of threshing (2 of the surviving varieties were not included in the mix due to poor threshability) and dual usage. The bits of cane I got to taste this year weren’t very sweet, but I only had like 2, so there’s hope! And Sistah Seeds has a dual purpose sorghum that I may add back into the mix next year. I sent seed back, so get some from Going to Seed if you’re interested in stewarding some drought tolerant friends. Thanks so much to Going to Seed for supporting me and this project, it has been invaluable!
Me, Dominique, standing in the field smiling while holding some white-seeded sorghum, likely from Sudan.
