Harvesting Broom Corn on a Cut Flower Farm
It’s the end of September and we’ve suddenly lurched into Autumn. Crispy cool mornings blanketed in fog, rainy days and afternoon sunshine. The most beautiful sunsets.
That also means we’re harvesting some really fun stuff, including broom corn!
I wrote this post to share my experience growing it for cut flower production. I tried to find info on growing it to dry to sell to florists and haven’t been able to find a whole lot, so hopefully this blog post helps! :)
What is Broom Corn?
Technically not a corn, but sorghum! It grows like 10 feet tall and is often used as a cover crop. The stiff flowering heads are often used to make broom heads, but it also is beautiful in fall floral displays and gives a lot of height to arrangements.
I grew ‘Hungarian Red’, which didn’t get as red as I’d hoped!
You can see how tall the broom corn is behind me!!
After it’s all chopped down (on the right is ornamental glass gem corn)
How I grew & harvested the broom corn for cut flower production
Here’s what the little patch looked like after cutting down the broom corn on the left. The tall corn on the right is ornamental glass gem corn.
This was my first year growing it, so I trialed growing 100 plants. It’s very easy to grow from seed and next year I’ll try direct seeding it, but this year I started it in the greenhouse in plugs.
We simply dumped a bunch of compost on an unused patch of ground and spaced them pretty close together, about 9 inches apart. They required regular watering to get them established the first month, but then I barely watered them all summer (and we don’t get rain in the summer here in oregon).
The stalks were thick so I cut them with sharp loppers.
These get HUGE so be sure to plant them somewhere intentional so they don’t shade anything else unnecessarily!
Once the birds started eating the berries, I figured it was time to start harvesting so we cut it all down.
One florist I work with requested 200 stems with the flower heads at different stages, so it was easy to just cut it all down in one go.
We piled it up and stripped each stalk one by one, laying it on a tarp after it was stripped of leaves.
I had one other person helping me and it took 2 hours for us both to cut everything down, strip the leaves off, cut to an even length, and bundle it in groups of 10 stems with rubber bands.
It took another hour to clean everything up and take all the extra roughage to the goats for a feast.
More photos below, click on them to make them larger!
