We planted some sorghum that has not been released as yet that we got from a NGO breeding program, our row width is 75 cm (30 inch) in our commercial crop so our small scale trials use the same. So to work out how many cm of a 75cm wide row gives us 1sq meter it is 100 divided by 75 equals 1.33 so according to my (sometimes wrong) calculations every 1330cm or 1.33m of row equals 1 square meter.
So the small scale trial rows are 13.3m long ( 1% of a hectare) we then planted four rows per variety.(4% of a hectare)
I then found a great planting tool, a pen, they are 14cm long so Alex (our gardener) and I used pens to space the plants at 14cm and using the blunt end make a hole, so per 1.33m or 1 square meter we planted 95 seeds if we assume a 80% establishment then that is 76 plants established or 76,000 plants per hectare. It would be about 25% more than I would aim for with Australian sorghum's in this environment although the sorghum's I have seen here don't seem to have the individual head potential.
If you click on the photo you will see some volunteer plants in clumps these were lost heads at harvest back last Nov/Dec. We sprayed pre planting with RU and Primagram which should ( I hope) give these freeloading plants a headache at least.
We have had just on 400mm over the past 25 days, a bit excessive and about double average for March/April/May combined.
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