I’m going to try it! Just got these sweet babies with some roots starting in only just a few days! Potted up this evening and under the light. I’m in zone 8b, South Puget Sound, WA.
Just some cane from a local market.
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Nice! I tried that once but failed. They fermented on me and it stank to the high heavens lol
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I’ve heard about them doing that! I’ll just hope they dont do that…
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im going to try growing some next summer. if you’re going to eat sugar it’s better to eat it unprocessed and this is alot cheaper than honey or maple syrup. i got some seeds of sugar beets im going to try growing as well.
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If they’ve rooted and they roots are healthy, they probably won’t. Somehow, some random bug got into mine and they were eating them from the inside out. I had no idea until it was too late
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My sugar beets failed so please post updates and such when you succeed 
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I grew some mangel beets last year which are supposed to be fodder and oh my gosh they seemed so much sweeter than regular eating beets to me!! Red Mangel and Yellow Eckendorf.
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“I tried that once but failed”
Cat mana. Got to have the cat mana for sugar cane in Washington. 
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Are we talking kitty roca?
no roca, supernatural kitty powers
Don’t know if it makes a difference or not but the cane farmers here in Louisiana lay the stalk horizontally in the row and then cover with a thin layer of dirt. They plant in August and get 3 years of harvest before the field is plowed and replanted. Good luck!
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As @Wolfmanjack said, typically you lay them horizontal to get the most nodes to grow. Makes sense to grow them vertical in a small space like that though. Do you know what variety it is at all? I know you said you just got it from the market.
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No idea on what variety, whatever they got in at the grocery store! And yes, they are vertical because of space.
I like that they get three years from the cane as opposed to an annual grow/harvest!
I’ve had the same experience 2x and for me it was houseflies. Outside of course I’d have stopped that inside haha
I may try again at some point and be diligent, whenever I hear something roots easily I give it no care basically
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I lay a chunk in good soil with optisorb and a little peat and keep it damp. one of these is my purple plant, a cutting from it. the other is a new variety someone sent me a chunk of that’s just starting, called “Asian black cane”
it will sprout from the side usually at a node making new leaves
I then pot it up. this is 2023
they shed leaves if you pot them, a few canes will get big enough to eat.
as the days get longer you can pick more but leave enough to have a new cane to chop with nodes, to replant. they will not survive winter where I am over in Spokane, too cold
what’s left will go mostly dormant in my greenhouse. the top photo is a cane chunk I cut out from this mess right before moving it in for the winter. it has been growing in a window sill in the house in that little pot waiting for summer.
this here is the dormant plant in the greenhouse starting to green up in spots. I’ll cut this way back as it’s on year 3 I think, and eat what I can, let it regrow, start more from it.
I started as a whim but I like the plant a lot. I get more sugar, candy juice, from my sorghum here though.
cane is an annual here unless you protect it or restart it every year. it doesn’t get big or ripe enough for to be sweet otherwise. sorghum you can let grow to right before frost then cut and crush up the stems and boil out and reduce to syrup. the grain is sweet and delicious too. easy to collect.
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Does it taste the same or similar? I love sugarcane juice and just munching on them in the summer. An easy substitution would be great
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I love this!! This is my first time getting to grow cane, but third time growing Sorghum this year! I’ve got a dual purpose variety called ‘Coral’ that I originally grew from EFN. The stalks on them have a nice sweet flavor, but I have not ried the grain as of yet. Got me a got bunch saved from last year’s crop to grow this year. I really like the way it looks!
I am halfway done getting my greenhouse set up and you give me hope to overwinter some sugarcane in the future!
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We live about 30 miles north of Houston, Texas and I have grown sugar cane in-ground from grocery store-bought pieces at least 3 times over the years. The first two times I used an old plastic wallpaper soaking tray (about 3’ long by 6” by 6”) that was filled with potting soil and laid the canes horizontally just below the soil to root. I eventually lost both outdoor plantings (unprotected) to hard freezes here, the most recent being the 9 F multi-day freeze in 2021. A couple years ago I saw fresh cane pieces for sale at our grocery store ($3 each for a 2’ long chunk) and decided to try again. My old wallpaper tray was long gone, so I simply surrounded the cane with damp potting mix and wrapped it with heavy-duty aluminum foil and stored it horizontally in our greenhouse with a large gap on the top to facilitate watering and growth. It pushed out 4 new shoots and I transplanted it into the garden that spring. The first winter I cut it down to 2’ high stubs, gave away all the cut canes, and covered the remaining stubs with a moving blanket and tarp for a 22 F freeze. It survived fine and regrew well. This past January it looked like this, just prior to a 24 F freeze, during which it got similar protection:
It regrew well again and was about 10’ tall by a couple weeks ago when a strong wind knocked virtually all of the canes to the ground, snapping most of the off completely. I cut them into 3 or 4-node pieces, each about 12 to 18” long. With my plant nursery space at a premium, I decided to root them vertically in 12” deep liners filled with ProMix. This works great, with essentially 100% pushing new growth in a couple weeks:
Interestingly I accidentally inverted a couple of the canes (“down end” sticking up into the air, see leftmost cane in photo above), and these also pushed new growth! I guess nutrients can move either direction in monocots?
I will be taking all these for attendees at the next Texas Rare Fruit Growers meeting in Houston in October (our annual pawpaw tasting and fund-raising event).
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