Pretty well, thanks.
The picture above is a week or two after first frost. It was green right up to our first killing frost.
The nice surprises are that:
- aside from watering, it pretty much took care of itself,
- I got about a pound of ginger per square foot of container, and
- it’s almost all immature or “baby” ginger.
The “immature” ginger is, in theory, a drawback, but in practice, it’s a nice bonus.
Immature ginger isn’t as strong as fully-mature ginger. And it has to be be used fresh or preserved, as (by reputation) it won’t keep on the shelf, the way mature ginger roots will.
But the upside is that immature ginger lacks the hard skin and woody fibers of mature ginger. This makes it a pleasure to use for cooking. Whatever can’t be used fresh becomes candied ginger, ginger syrup, frozen fresh ginger puree, and just-plain-frozen-whole ginger.
A few comments on growing and harvesting ginger in USDA zone 7.
Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.
Ginger is a tropical plant.
My garden soil (in USDA zone 7) never gets warm enough to make ginger happy. I have to grow it in some sort of container, so that the soil will get to the roughly 90F that ginger prefers. This, in turn, meant hooking up some irrigation on a timer, because otherwise I’d forget to water those containers. So there’s a fair bit of prep required to get this up and running.
This year, I followed the standard advice and started ginger inside. The idea being that you need to start it 10 months before first frost, if you want any hope of harvesting mature ginger root. But starting it early was a waste of time, because normal wintertime room temperature is too cold for ginger to grow. So, unless you want to keep heating your ginger the entire time you’re growing it, all it does is sit around and wait for warmer weather.
Now that I know I actually prefer immature ginger root, next year I’m just going to plant it outside, in planters, around the first of June (Zone 7). Knowing full well that I can’t get mature ginger that way.
Similarly, my ginger seemed to stop growing entirely by mid-September here in Zone 7. It didn’t die. It just didn’t grow. Again, now that I know I won’t get mature ginger root, I could dig it up any time time from early September onward. Any time after the heat of summer has passed.
The upshot is that in Zone 7, if you grow it in containers outdoors, you have more-or-less three months in which ginger will grow. Any spring-like or fall-like temperatures simply sends it into hibernation. But the good news is that this is plenty of time to produce a crop of immature ginger. And the better news is that, for me at least, immature ginger is a lot nicer to cook with than standard, mature ginger root.
Nothing bothers ginger, here in Virginia. I had zero insect, animal, or disease damage on this little crop of ginger.
If I had this to do over, I’d pick a different growing medium that wouldn’t stick together so well. In the end, a) the ginger was firmly rooted in the potting soil I used, and b) every “elbow” of the ginger root (where two lobes grew close together) trapped dirt. I had to break the ginger up fully into pieces, so that I could scrub out all the trapped dirt.
The upshot of all that is that the digging-and-cleaning step was tedious. I don’t know how they get commercial ginger roots so clean, but I suspect it involves some sort of power sprayer. Next year, I think I’m going to try spraying it down, outside, using the garden hose.
