1st annual sorghum maze is Oct. 12-13

Mayo — Steve Shiver of Mayo is inviting the public out to his farm on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 12-13 (Pioneer Day weekend) to test their skills in his newly created four-acre sorghum maze. According to Shiver, approximate time through the maze is 28 minutes and the cost is $5 per person.

“I am providing the public with a 1,020 square foot shelter space to be used as a staging area before entering the maze and completing it,” said Shiver.

The area where the sorghum is planted, he said, originally started out as a field full of pine trees, which were harvested about five years ago. Left behind were lots of tree stumps, including stumps from water oaks and cherry trees.

Shiver said, “To keep that from growing up into a jungle, about three times a year I’m having to take a tractor and bush hog and mow it. I got that cleaned up and I put 10 tons of chicken litter to it, 4,000 pounds of dolomite, and planted it in rye for a cover crop to bring up my organic matter.”

On July 1, Shiver planted a crop of sorghum, which is basically feed for cows, he explained.

“The reason it isn’t a corn maze is that I don’t have a way of irrigating it,” he said.

Sorghum, he said, is much more tolerant than corn because it adapts better to the environment.

“It’ll wait on rainfall,” he said. “Luckily, we had a wet year.”

Shiver said he got the idea for his sorghum maze when he was reading a magazine at a doctor’s office. The article was about a 75-year-old couple in Alachua County who had two corn mazes on their property, a four-acre one and a 10-acre one.

At the four-acre corn maze, the couple invites all area elementary school students to come out for $5 apiece during the month of October, Shiver said.

“They’re booked,” he said. “On the weekends they open it up to the general public.”

That corn maze event, Shiver said, got so big they had to contract it out to a maze company comprised of college students, who book the attendants and work at the site seven days a week during the month of October.

“It’s about a $100,000 gig,” said Shiver. “It costs the couple about $1,700 for the company to come in and run the maze for them. I said, bingo! Now I know what I can do for that stump field.”