I’ve been really enjoying the bounty of edible plants that are available fresh (and organic!) for the picking. The key to Praew and my ideas about food gardening is finding edible plants that either already grow on our land without planting them (such as Thai morning glory, “takob” berries, amaranth) or else plants that are so well adapted to our land that after planting they take off on their own without tending (such as papaya, multiple varieties of bananas, passion fruit, corn, chili peppers).

Both types of plants can be grown with minimal effort, no pesticides or chemicals, no special greenhouse, and to be honest, without any artificial watering. (There is enough rainfall, and the groundwater isn’t very deep at all.) We are truly lazy gardeners. Hurrah for tropical plants and tropical climates!

There is a bunch of sugarcane stalks growing on our land that fall into the first category. We didn’t plant them, but they are close to the boundary with our neighbor, so they may have grown sugar cane a number of years back and it simply spread onto our land. I’ve been eyeing it for a few weeks now, ever since a friend asked me if I’ve ever eaten raw sugarcane before. And my answer was, “no, I haven’t, but it grows on my land.”

Here is a picture of the bunch of stalks…

(Well it may not be that small. It is about 3-4m high.)

So I finally interrupted a weekly meeting we were having to discuss the progress of construction with the workers and asked K’Tanawat to show me how to eat it.

He grabbed a machete and chose a nice big one and hacked it off at the bottom

Then he peeled the outside “skin” off the plant with the machete

And finally he cracked it open so I could pull off some of the fibrous insides:

And I had my first taste of raw organic sugarcane…

Interestingly, he cut off the top part that has the green leaves and stuck it back into the ground to grow more sugarcane. Apparently, sugarcane is a grass and like other grasses can propagate this way.

The flavor was surprisingly refreshing. It tasted exactly like I imagined from those old “C&H sugar” commercials on TV when I was a kid. (You remember, “from Hawaii, C&H pure cane sugar, that’s the one…“)

It’s a rare thing that actually tastes how it looks on the exaggerated TV ads.

Anyway, the unexpected part is that after you chew for a little while and all that sugary goodness comes out of the stalk onto your tongue, you end up chewing on a very fibrous inedible lump in your mouth. After spitting it out and taking another bite to get more of the yummy sugary flavor a few times, you start to notice that some of the fibers are building up in your mouth. 5-10 minutes later and it kinda felt like I had just removed a bunch of cotton balls from my mouth and there were a number of fibers left over.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a pro, not a con. The neat thing about this is that sugarcane may be one of those very few junk foods that has an automatic mechanism to keep you from overeating it.

The next question is whether I want to buy a small hand press for squeezing the raw sugarcane juice out and drink a glass of it chilled on a hot summer day. 🙂

It is worth noting that there are quite a few websites touting the health benefits of raw sugarcane juice. (“Nutrients galore! It is like wheatgrass juice but sweeter!”)

But after a bit of reading, it is also worth noting that raw sugarcane juice can be a source of diseases, like Leptospirosis. Hmm. I’ll have to think about this for a bit.

There is always the possibility of making rum out of it instead. 😉