sugar

so planning to grow some sugar is pretty fun,
depending on where you live will tell you what to grow for your sugar,
I tried sugar cane this year,

and as you can see it is not doing very well
it died back in the summer when it got low humidity,
so I am unlikely to be able to grow it here...

but sugar comes from other places,
beets can grow you sugar, and they like cool weather,
sugar beets are just plane white, no red pigment to get in the way of things
so all you have to do to get the sugar out of them is to shred them or cut them into tiny cubes (1/4 inch) or slice them thin, and then boil that for an hour or so till they are soft,
you then take the water they cooked in and evaporate it till it gets to a thick syrup, then you let it evaporate into crystals... or you put a string in it so that you get one big crystal, and that is easy to use (just pour water over it to get sugar water falling off it) and ants can't carry off something that big.
but sadly it is likely to warm here to grow sugar beets.

lastly you have corn and sorghum,
they will grow here, but you don't get sugar that is very white from it, at least not easily,
so you want to form a single big crystal of it and then wash off the crystal when you are done and it is somewhat more pure...
you do need to press the liquid out of the stalk of the plant to get at it, to make it easy you should have a roller press, but at least with sorghum it can leak out of the stems, so it is not that hard to get at with other presses.
with sweet corn you can harvest the cobs and then process the stalks, so you might not need any additional growing area for it, and that is pretty neat,


if I could grow the beets here it would be handy do it due to how easy it is to process 
but I think I will try the sorghum sugar next year as a sugar crop,

here is a fantastic (and free) book with all you will need to know to grow sorghum and turn it to sugar.
https://archive.org/details/sorghumhandbookt01blym