Sorghum

In my family, the last weekend of September means only one thing:
sorghum.

What's sorghum, you ask? Okay, you didn't ask, BUT...this is sorghum:

In my family, sorghum also means that we all pile into the car and go down to the family farm in Iowa, where we celebrate the sorghum harvest. For 20 years--rain or shine--our relatives and Iowa friends have been coming to harvest, eat a good potluck, and visit all day. It's not very glamorous, but it's fun. I've been going almost every year since I was two years old, and I love seeing all my people who I don't usually see enough of.

So when we get there in the morning, what we do first is cut down the sorghum out in the field.

Any kid or adult can help with the preparations. I remember being eight or nine years old when somebody handed me a machete (which gets the job done), and before I knew it I was cutting down sorghum that was five feet taller than I was.

Meanwhile, someone starts a fire.

A contained fire, that is.

Then we take the truckload of sorghum over to the press.

It's powered by a tractor, and there's a belt that turns the press. Then you just feed the press some yummy sorghum, and the juice comes out the side in bright green trickles into the designated plastic ice cream bucket, which is then poured into the designated metal milk pail to be strained.

I remember one year where instead of using the tractor, they had this wooden contraption where historically you hitched up the draft horses and they would walk around in circles to power the press. But nobody there had a horse, or bothered to bring one, so they enlisted all of us kids to grab hold of it and carry it in circles. It was heavy. Eventually a few grown ups took pity on us and helped, and we managed to get some juice that way.

After you have the juice, you pour it into the vat, which sits atop the aforementioned fire, and you let it boil, but not too much! And stay clear of the smoke and steam. After the juice thickens up a bit, you have yourself a fine jarful of sweet greenish sorghum goo. It's basically like molasses, and tastes very good in cookies and other things.

In between all that, we break for a potluck lunch in the dairy barn. It's all cleaned out and hasn't housed cows for a long time, but you can still see the stations where they stood.

The neighbor's dog likes to come and beg for food, and we always wave the Norwegian flag from the barn. I just loved the color of the soybeans that were all around us.



Ahhh yes, sorghum weekend was good.