The 2006 crop of French cane is now nicely matured. Please PM me with your requested sizes if you need any. Prices are below that of Medir et al.
So Mike following on from Sam’s post re pipemakers wheels what vehicle do go cane harvesting in ?
John
Actually I get chauffeured around courtesy of Chris Bayley in a very comfy MPV. Wandering about in the warm sunshine of the South of France picking nice cane is very tiring, so we ensure that we have frequent stops for decent food, superlative coffee and the odd case or five of wine. 
We are going harvesting again this Easter, and will be picking cane grown on two types of ground; the freshwater fed areas of a limited number of secret locations and the brackish areas around the Camargue. This is to investigate whether and how the cane from the two separate growth areas differ in terms of hardness, wall thickness and flexibility.
I found it very interesting how the cane varied over a fairly small bit of Spain. Though I’d have like to get up the where Medir operate I had to contend with the Sierra Nevadas and the coast adjacent to them. I liked the high altitude cane best for drone reeds, but it had to be growing by a water course - this was on the road between Bubion and Orgiva. In the riverbed at Orgiva there’s loads of the stuff but because it’s harvested by the locals it was all still green, ie there was no old and softer stuff. I’m no longer sure that cane becomes softer by standing and rotting as some of the stuff I cut green is usable now it’s dried out.
The cane growing along the coast was very different, I ought to have noted my impressions at the time as I can no longer be sure what the main differences were.
It was my experience that drone cane is much easier to get good stuff of than chanter cane, also it saves me more money and I can bring more of it back, however if I had had my reedmaking kit with me I could have found chanter cane of a very high quality . . I’m pretty sure of that. Also I was there at the wrong time of year for chanter cane, and would like to go back in October.
Loads of cane grows on the south coast, but we saw hardly any in central Spain, and what was growing on the North coast was much too stunted to be useful. I brought some rhizomes back and will try and grow them in our peat bog . . .
I may be wrong in this, but I am of the opinion that cane reroduces genetic copies of itself (considering new rhizomes being off-shoots from their parent plant [root and stem buds]), and that cane which is ‘stunted’ will reproduce like offspring.
Any thoughts regarding this?
Perhaps, though this wouldn’t really be true of any of the things that I grow to eat, such as rhubarb, which produce genetically identical copies when divided. I’m sure that growing conditions have a big impact anyway - I took the rhizomes from some good big cane from the South but I doubt that it will grow big in Yorkshire!
What you say will certainly be true of cane growing in close proximity - i.e. if you want big cane, take rhizomes from the biggest you can find. That’s how plants are bred for certain characteristics I think.
It has been a while since I read that and I unfortunately do not have my research material before me… it being 1,500 miles away locked up in storage somewhere in the happy state of Florida.
The impression, however, I got from it was that this was not a common thing among most forms of flora (at least to the degree my research stated regarding Arundo), and that Arundo didn’t need to be divided to produce copies of the parent plant.
I’m a little foggy on the particulars of this, and as such, I think I may have to redo some research on the matter… if only to refresh my memory… it’s been a few years now.
Hi MIke
There is a member from Oz looking for chanter cane - do you have any ?
https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/npu-cane/62365/1
John