A Clean Sweep
Copyright © 2000 Country Living Gardener. Used with permission.
Good things come in small packages. In Worthington, Mass., John Patrick (“J.P.,” for short) Welch looked through his mail one day and found a paper packet small enough to fit in the palm of his hand but big enough to change his life. Inside were the seeds of Sorghum vulgare (broomcorn), the source for America’s brooms since the 17th century. The petite packet was a gift from friends in Arkansas who had noted J.P.’s admiration for brooms made the old-fashioned way: by hand. “When you get broomcorn seeds, you have to make a broom,” J.P. asserts. He and his wife, Marian, the owners of Justamere Tree Farm on the eastern slopes of the Berkshires, quickly learned it take a lot of broomcorn to make just one standard-size broom - 60 plants, in fact. Each plant puts forth a single tassle, and 60 tassles must be harvested, trimmed, and fastened to a broomstick (hewn from local sassafras, which looks great with the bark still attached) before it is completed.
Today, more than a decade after sowing his first packet of broomcorn seeds, J.P. makes and sells as many as 3,000 brooms a year. He and Marian still grow their own Sorghum vulgare, but they save it for demonstrations J.P. gives every autumn at festivals throughout New England. Most of the broomcorn J.P. uses to craft his wide assortment of brooms comes from Mexico, where conditions are just about perfect for the large-scale cultivation of this semitropical plant. (Unlike field corn, broomcorn does not have male and female parts on each planet; its tassle is longer, its seeds fewer.) While each completed broom brings in between $10 and $40, money isn’t why J.P. spends his winters wedded to and antique broom vise (a hard-to-find style made only between 1850 and 1900).
“I guess you could say I like history a lot,” explains this expert craftsman, who once worked for a forestry company and planted more than a million trees all across America. More than raising Christmas trees or tapping maple tress (his family produces between 400 and 500 gallons of maple syrup a year), broommaking has allowed him to indulge his passion for the past. He has discovered, for example, that while the Shakers certainly popularized the flat broom, they most likely did not invent it. The credit belongs to Souther slaves, who also cultivated America’s first Sorghum vulgare specifically bred for broommaking. More important than making brooms, J.P. believes, is “getting out the word about the development of broomcorn in this country.”