Yield: Approximately one-half pound roasted ginger root.
Preparation time: Ten minutes.
Cook time: Two weeks.
- Purchase a few ounces of organic ginger root.
- Wash and cut into bite-sized chunks.
- Sprinkle with copious amounts of potting soil.
- Water to taste.
- Place on seedling heat mat.
- Bake at ~110F for one to two weeks, or until shoots fail to develop.
Ready, Fire, Aim.
I started some ginger and turmeric plants about two weeks ago (Post G24-003). This is the first time I’ve tried growing these.
For me, they fall into the same garden category as potatoes and sweet potatoes. They are roots/tubers that you start by sprouting indoors, before moving them out to the garden much later in the year. The sole difference, really, is that these will need to spend several months as houseplants before going out into the garden.
The potatoes are doing fine — see prior post.
The sweet potatoes aren’t expected to start sprouting for another couple of months.
But ginger and turmeric sprouts are now conspicuous by their absence, nearly two weeks after planting. So I decided to see what was up.
Turns out, the cheap seed-starting heat mat I bought from Amazon last year was a bit too powerful for the task. I thought it might warm the soil enough for to prod these into growth — maybe 80F or so, from my roughly 60F floor. Never bothered to check it. I figured that, if anything, that cheap little mat wouldn’t cut it, and so this tray of soil might remain too cool for the ginger and turmeric to sprout.
But now I see that I have more-or-less cooked those roots, over the past two weeks. What felt warm to the touch was actually around 110F where the roots sit. Pretty sure that’s lethally warm.
Another twenty degrees and I can claim I was trying to compost them.
In hindsight, expecting that off-the-shelf heat mat to be just perfect, for this situation, was kind of dumb.
So it’s back to the grocery store for another few dollars’ worth of ginger and turmeric.
And off to rummage in the garage for some sort of lamp dimmer or similar, to allow me to control the temperature of these heat mats. Pretty sure that anything that will control a small electrical resistance load will work. That, and a thermometer, and I ought to be able to make this work.
