The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Cenchrus pedicellatus
Also called Hairy Fountain Grass, Annual Kyasuwa Grass, Deenanth Grass, Kyasuwa Grass
Annual Mission Grass (Cenchrus pedicellatus, also called desho grass) is a tall, drought-tolerant fodder grass native to Ethiopia and tropical Africa and Asia. It is grown mainly for livestock feed and soil conservation, and is planted from cuttings rather than seed.
Cenchrus pedicellatus, previously Pennisetum pedicellatum, known simply as desho or as desho grass, is an indigenous grass of Ethiopia of the monocot angiosperm plant family Poaceae. It is also known as annual kyasuwa grass in Nigeria, bare in Mauritania, and deenanath grass in India. It grows in its native geographic location, naturally spreading across the escarpment of the Ethiopian highlands. Widely available in this location, it is ideal for livestock feed and can be sustainably cultivated on small plots of land. Thus desho is becoming increasingly utilized, along with various soil and water conservation techniques, as a local method of improving grazing land management and combating a growing productivity problem of the local region.
The technical specifications for cultivating desho are essential to improve grazing land management practices. Cuts of the grass are ideally planted in rows, spaced at 10 cm by 10 cm, using a hand hoe. This spacing gives each plant sufficient soil nutrients and access to sunlight to achieve optimal growth, while ensuring the soil will be completely covered by the grass once established. It is recommended to plant other species alongside desho to promote biodiversity. Multipurpose shrubs/trees, for example Leucaena sp and Sesbania sp, can be planted approximately 5 m apart with no particular layout. Other legumes, such as alfalfa and clover, can be mixed in with desho by being broadcast throughout the plot.
Once planted, maintenance activities such as applying fertilizer, weeding and gap filling, ensure proper establishment and persistence of desho. Fertilizer should be applied throughout the plot one month after planting. It is recommended to use organic compost in the form of animal manure, leaf litter, wood ash, food scraps, and/or any other rich biodegradable matters.
Desho is used as a year round fodder. To maintain the sustainability of the intervention, the plot is permanently made inaccessible to free grazing livestock; instead a cut-and-carry system is encouraged. Cut-and-carry means that desho is harvested and brought to livestock for stall-feeding. Due to its rapid growth rate, desho provides regular harvests, even reaching monthly cuts during the rainy reason. Once a year, just before the dry season, sufficient grass is harvested and stored as hay to feed the livestock until the rains return.
Pearl millet · Indian sandbur · Buffel grass · Kikuyugrass · Southern sandbur · Mat sandbur · Oriental Fountain Grass · Elephant Grass · Cenchrus riparius · Crimson Fountaingrass · Birdwood grass · Sandbur
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cenchrus pedicellatus by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
