Panicum miliaceum Seeds | Proso Millet
LATIN NAME: Panicum miliaceum
COMMON NAME: Proso Millet
Plant Profile
Proso millet is a quick, shallow-rooted annual of the grass family, domesticated in northern China and grown across the dry lands of Asia, Europe and North America. It grows sixty to a hundred and twenty centimetres, with broad, slightly hairy leaves and a loose, drooping panicle of small round grains in cream, yellow, red or near-black.
It is the fastest of the millets, ripening in sixty to ninety days from sowing, and it will grow where the season is too short or too dry for sorghum. The grain is small, about three millimetres across, and it cooks quickly into a soft, mild porridge. The stems are stiff and hollow, and the whole plant is pale and slightly grey in the field.
Science & Biotechnology
Proso millet is one of the oldest cultivated grains in the world, with evidence of domestication in the Yellow River basin around ten thousand years ago, earlier than wheat or rice in their own centres. It spread west along the steppe route to Europe by the Bronze Age and reached North America with settlers in the eighteenth century.
The grain is gluten-free and has a waxy and a non-waxy form, the difference lying in a single gene for starch synthase. It is a short-day plant with a very short life cycle, and it escapes drought rather than tolerating it, which is why it crops in a season that would fail for maize. Its genome was sequenced in 2019, and breeders are now working on lodging resistance and on uniform ripening, the two traits that limit mechanical harvest.
Uses & Benefits
The grain is cooked as a porridge or pilaf, milled into flour for flatbreads, and used as a gluten-free ingredient in breakfast cereals and snack bars. In the United States most of the crop goes into birdseed, and in Europe it is grown as a catch crop and as feed for cage birds.
It is also a useful summer cover crop, sown after a failed crop or after early vegetables, since it covers the ground in six weeks and can be incorporated before frost. As a garden plant it is worth growing for the seed heads, which hang in loose, elegant sprays and are good in dried arrangements, and for the birds they bring.
Growing from Seed
Sow after the last frost, when the soil is above 15 °C, at two to three centimetres deep and twenty to thirty centimetres apart, or broadcast at three grams per square metre for a patch. The seedlings are vigorous from the start and appear in five to seven days.
The crop needs little water and no nitrogen, which would only make it lodge. Thin to a hand’s width apart and keep the weeds down for the first three weeks, after which the canopy closes. Harvest when the grain at the top of the panicle is hard and the leaves begin to yellow, cutting the heads and drying them under cover, since birds will take the crop if it is left standing.
Our Take
The fastest grain in the seed catalogue: sixty days from sowing to harvest, on almost no water. Grow it for porridge, for birds, or for the look of the heads.
Related Reading
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