Harvesting Texas Bassoon Cane! 🌿

I thought I’d do a post all about the bassoon cane that grows wild in Texas! Today I went to go gather cane with a fellow professional bassoonist- Sabrina Stovall!

This plant, Arundo donax, can grow over 20 feet tall and is actually quite invasive. In the right conditions it can grow 4 inches a day from underground nodes called rhizomes. Apparently the rhizomes can be ground into flour and eaten 😳 (new project?). Here’s what those rhizomes look like: 

This particular stand of cane grows close to I10 and I’ve had my eye on it for about a year now. To give you an idea of how quickly it grows, the area we were in had recently been partially cleared by construction equipment- you can see the rhizomes have already started putting out new shoots of growth!

When looking for a good stalk of cane, it helps to pick one that has been growing relatively straight and doesn’t have any cracks or defects. A lot of the cane here had been dry for quite some time and finding fresh, intact pieces with the correct diameter was a bit of a task! Since most bassoon came comes from tubes that are around 23-26 millimeters, I try to find canes that are around 27 at the base, that way I know all of the tubes above it will be at least 27 or less.

While I still don’t have the tools to process the tube cane, I have sent off a “test” batch from last winter to another reedmaker for processing. Everything I’ve read seems to say that cane should be aged for quite some time so all of the moisture is removed. If the test batch comes back usable, my goal is to have a nice big stockpile of aged cane ready to go! 

Here’s the final harvest:

And here’s my poor car after it was packed up and ready to go 😆 (Hi, Sabrina!) :

Note to self: find someone with a truck next time! Lol! Now that it’s home, cane will be bundled up and stored in an outdoor shed for a year or more!

 
Thanks for reading! 🎶🎶🎶