Today, I’m going to be sharing with you how we grow ginger and turmeric here at the farm. This is one of my favorite things to grow. It’s easy and doesn’t take a lot of work, also the blooms are beautiful to have in your garden.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Ginger & Turmeric
1:04 Basics of Growing
2:34 Plating Ginger & Turmeric
5:36 Tips for Successful Harvest
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name is Lindsey and I’m here at the Urban Farm. Today, I’m gonna be sharing with you how we grow ginger and turmeric here at the farm. This is one of my favorite things to grow. It’s really easy. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and the blooms are beautiful. They’re very tropical. Ginger and turmeric are tropical plants, so they’re a very aesthetic plant to have in the garden, and you can grow an abundance of these crops, and they are really good crops to store long term. So you have one harvest a year, but you get to store your ginger and turmeric all year long. So they’re really great thing to integrate into your garden.
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This is some ginger I have. I’m gonna be planting the ginger in this bed. This is just a longer raised bed. This is where our sweet potatoes were just harvested from, so they just had a bunch of roots in them and the soil is nice and loose and well-draining. So this ginger is just from the grocery store. You can use organic or regular ginger. You just wanna make sure that it has little nodes. That’s an important thing to look for to make sure that it wasn’t sterilized. Ginger is a rhizome, so we call it ginger root, but it’s actually a rhizome. It’s a modified root, which means that it has nodes and internodes, and you can see that it is already starting to sprout from some of these areas.
So this node has created a sprout, which will then turn to the leaves that come above ground, and it’s already starting to make these little roots. So this is a very productive grocery store, ginger.
And then I have some turmeric from the grocery store as well. And also some of the smaller pieces that we harvested just a couple days ago from our turmeric from last year. So these are just pieces that weren’t really worth saving or that had broken off. So just a good mix of those. And we will be planting both.
So when you’re planting ginger pieces like this that are really big, you can put the whole thing in the ground or in a pot, and that’ll be perfectly fine. But I’m gonna break off some of these pieces just to separate the plants a little bit. I wanna give them enough room that each of these sprouts, especially since they are already sprouting, have enough room to grow. It’s really easy. You can just break it off and you can see where the roots are starting. So the roots don’t necessarily start where you break it off. The sprout might start from here. So don’t be too worried about this being a clean cut or not, but if you want to, you can cut them. One of the reasons why this is one of my favorite things to grow is because it could not be easier to plant. You just wanna make sure that you have well draining soil, especially in the beginning. One of the most fatal flaws you can make when planting rhizomes, like this is overwatering. This is a root, basically. But if your piece doesn’t already have sprouts, then it’s basically just sitting until it grows those roots and without any of those roots to use that water and convert it into the energy to sprout, your root is just sitting in soggy soil. So you wanna make sure your soil is really well draining. You don’t want your root to dry out, but you wanna make sure it’s not soggy, cause then you’ll just, your root will just rot. And it’s really easy. I’m just breaking apart this soil a little bit, and I’m simply gonna place this on its side.
You can see how these are growing. This sprout is gonna go up. So if we placed it like this, we don’t really wanna place it like this. It’ll be, the root will just be too deep in the soil, and then you just cover it like so. And there’s no really, there’s no science to the spacing of them. I’m just trying to give them enough space that when they shoot up and have their leaves, they’re not going to be crowded. and even though this one has a sprout, I’m still gonna place it under the soil. I’m just gonna very barely cover it.
And same with the turmeric. So you just wanna make sure that the pieces you have have these internodes. That’s where the sprout comes from. And just again, place them horizontally and just lightly cover.
And whether you’re doing this in a raised bed or in a pot, you just wanna make sure good drainage. You don’t want it to dry out or be too soggy. You also wanna make sure it’s in a sunny place. So right now, this tree above me is providing some shade, which is good. We don’t want necessarily full sun, but eventually all of this bed will be in the sun and that will be ideal. You also wanna plant in a more humid setting. These are tropical plants. They thrive on humidity in the air. So if you live in a more arid climate like phoenix, you maybe want that shade. You want to be close to a misting system. We’re going to use above head sprinklers for these. So that will provide some extra moisture and humidity in the air, which will be essential for these to work out. I’m also gonna start some in pots and keep them in our cold room where we start seedlings because that room is always really humid. So I’m thinking that the ginger especially is gonna have a little bit more luck in that room because it is so humid. But this is definitely an experiment. We have grown turmeric before here on the farm, and it does great. But this is our first year planting ginger. So I hope it works out. And I hope this inspires you to grow some turmeric and ginger in your own garden.
