Merry Lea Sustainable Farm hosted its annual molasses-making party the week of October 3. Four volunteers helped staff members extract juice from sorghum stalks and set the liquid to boiling.
Sorghum is a sturdy grass that grows about chest high. It is native to Africa, where the seed heads are eaten as a grain. In the U.S., it is more commonly a southern crop, grown in Appalachian states. Nevertheless, some of those volunteering who are longtime Hoosiers remembered getting out of school for the sorghum harvest. At Merry Lea, sorghum is used as a cover crop on poor soil that needs rehabilitation.
The process of shredding sorghum stalks netted about 25 gallons of sap. This will reduce to roughly two and a half gallons of sorghum molasses.
Making sorghum molasses is a reminder of the hard work that kept sweets to a healthy minimum
in years past. “You would never want to do this alone,” Farm Manager Katie Friesen Kempf observed. “But when you have a group of people, it’s fun.”
