Ginger Harvest February 2021 (indoors)
A non comprehensive writeup of my experience growing Ginger indoors (in Winter)
Ginger needs:
I like to cook a lot of Asian inspired dishes and thus have quite a high demand for ginger throughout the year. In 2020 I decided to grow my own ginger for the first time, mainly to avoid buying ginger from supermarkets. Supermarket ginger comes mostly from China and with the still ongoing genocide against the Uyghur minority by the Chinese government I cant with good consciousness keep buying products from China personally. I don't want to have any part in the genocide and am honestly ashamed at the lack of action by my government. I'm German, I would have thought we learned a thing or two from our past. Anyway, this article is not about politics but ginger so back to the topic at hand.
The only problem with growing ginger at home; I do not have a garden but only a small rented apartment in the heart of a larger German city. Gotta make due with what you got so I bought a terracotta bowl that’s far wider than it is deep. As a potting mix I used my own, made from 45% peat, 40% vermiculite, 15% fine sand and some dolomite lime and gypsum. It’s just what I had at hand and minus the addition of sand it’s what I use for most of all my plants. I added the sand to improve drainage as to my understanding ginger likes to be watered more frequently but doesn’t enjoy sitting in water. This media is very fluffy and thus ideal for the ever expanding rhizomes of ginger.
My harvested Ginger rhizomes, mother-rhizomes on the left
I bought my ginger rhizomes at my local supermarket (REWE). I made sure only to buy organic ginger (from Peru) because evidently some non organic ginger is sprayed with some sort of growth inhibitors. When selecting ginger for growing make sure that the rhizomes have a lot of ‘eyes’, that’s where new growth will occur.
On October the 14th 2020 I planted exactly 200g of fresh organic ginger after soaking it in lukewarm water with some hydrogen peroxide to kill off any pathogens for about 12 hours or so. After 14 days the first shoots started emerging from the soil. After another 14 days the first leaves started unfurling. At first only five shoots were growing for quite a while until they reached a height of about 50-60cm. Then in the middle of December 2020 the plant finally started producing new sprouts, about 1-2 new shoots per each established shoot. From this moment on the ginger plant developed new shoots regularly and I soon had a small forest of ginger that I didn’t know where to put.
In my limited experience ginger likes to have warm, slightly damp soil around it and prefers to be as hot as possible air temperature wise. It also likes a high humidity. To accommodate its needs I placed the driver for my LED quantum boards right underneath the pot which kept the soil temperature at around 20-27°C when the lights where on. My air temperature hovered around 25°C (sometimes a bit hotter) and my humidity was usually around 60%. I often sprayed the ginger plant with distilled water which it seemed to like. That additional water also helped it with unfurling its new leaves. Sometimes leaves would get stuck unfurling and looked like they were about to snap off but a little bit of water seemed to lubricate it enough to do it’s job properly.
Ginger usually takes about 10 months or so to fully mature. I needed the place for my early spring planting so I harvested very early. I first tried to dig the rhizomes up by hand, thinking I could just pull them out but I soon realized that the entire pot was a web of very dense interlaced roots. I lifted the whole plant with roots and soil from the pot and started breaking off roots to uncover the rhizomes.
It was quite a task to clean the rhizomes properly which I first did with a brush and then under running water with an old toothbrush.
All in all I harvested 714g of Ginger of which 200g was the old ginger that I planted. You can differentiate them easily, the mother ginger was a lot darker in color while the newly grown ginger was pale and it barely had any skin. You don’t have to peel ginger as fresh as this!
The stalks and leaves can be used as well and are milder and not as “spicy” as the rhizomes but with the same lemony flavor profile. You can use the leaves for making ginger tea (I like to add some lemon) or use them in cooking similar to how you'd use bay leaves. The stalks are perfect for stir fries and such. Just keep in mind that stalks and leaves are of similar texture to the ginger rhizome which is to say they are quite fibrous. It’s advised to cut against the grain for that reason.
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