Quite well, starting with candied (crystallized) ginger, shown above.
After a rough start, growing ginger in Virginia turned out to be an outstanding success.
The big plus of growing ginger in this climate (USDA zone 7) is that the growing season is way too short to produce mature ginger root. So what I got was seven pounds of immature (baby) ginger. And, as it turns out, immature ginger is a lot nicer to cook with than mature ginger.
My inability to produce mature ginger root is a feature, not a bug.
Ginger, being a tropical plant, never saw it coming.
The picture above is a week or two after first killing frost.
My ginger stayed lovely and green, right up to the night that it froze solid. I can only assume that, as a tropical plant, it had no idea what was about to happen.
In any case, for a growing season that effectively started in June, I got three nice surprises:
- Aside from watering, it pretty much took care of itself.
- I got about a pound of ginger per square foot of container.
- It’s all immature or “baby” ginger.
The unexpected plus is that immature ginger root (shown below) is much nicer to use than mature ginger root.
Hassle-free fresh ginger tea?
Immature ginger — shown cleaned and bagged, above, and cut into chunks just above — lacks the tough skin and woody fibers of mature ginger. (Note I did not say “fibers”, I said “woody fibers”.) This makes it much nicer to use than mature ginger. Among other things, it’s easy to slice (using the slicer portion of a garlic press), and cooked thin slices of whole root are pleasantly edible.
On the downside, some say immature ginger isn’t as strong-tasting as mature ginger root. But ours is plenty peppery enough for us. Others say that, lacking a tough skin, immature ginger has to be used fresh or preserved. That drawback, I buy into. After cleaning, the roots are nearly skinless. They surely don’t look tough, the way mature ginger root looks.
Aside from ginger syrup (which yields crystallized (candied) ginger slices as a byproduct), my wife’s preferred bulk preservation method is to create ice cubes of frozen ginger puree.
The sequence below shows chunks of (cleaned) immature ginger being turned into frozen ginger puree.
First, chunk (as above), then chop in a food processor. After cutting the immature ginger roots into chunks the size of grapes, run those ginger chunks through a small food processor. Pulse/scrape as needed until you get them to the consistency of a chopped-up paste. Like so:
Then purée: Add just enough water to let that mix circulate and turn into a smooth purée as the food processor runs. If you were adding a small amount of citric acid as a preservative, you’d add it while puréeing.) Let it run. From chopped to puréed might be five minutes of food-processor running time.
Freeze as you would ice cubes. Pour/spatula the puréed immature ginger root into a silicone ice cube tray. (Silicone makes it easier to release when frozen.)
Store the frozen cubes in the container of your choice.
One cube yields one cup of ginger tea (with the addition of a cup of hot water and the sweetener of your choice.) As if made from the fresh root. Insoluble plant matter in the cube becomes dregs in the bottom of the cup.
Ginger syrup and crystalized ginger
To our surprise, ginger syrup and candied ginger are two products of the same process. You boil thinly-sliced ginger root in water for half-an-hour. Toss most of that liquid. Add sugar. Boil for another half-an-hour. Pour off and save the liquid to be ginger-infused simple syrup. Dust the ginger slices with table sugar, and leave them to dry.
The results, when dry, are candied ginger.
It’s candy, but you don’t pop these like Tic-Tacs. Ginger root is peppery — the “gingerols” in ginger are analogs to the capsaicins in hot peppers. This “candy” is not for the faint-of-heart. And you’d best like the taste of ginger, because it’ll be with you for a while after you eat one.
A few comments on growing and harvesting ginger in USDA zone 7.
My prior post has most of the technical details on growing 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.
At the other end of the season, 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.
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 seems to send it into hibernation. To be a fair, it is a tropical plant. It’s my bad for planting it an inappropriate climate. But the good news is that this seems to be plenty of time to produce a crop of immature ginger. Which, as I noted above, just seem to beat the pants off of mature ginger root, from an ease-of-culinary-use standpoint.
Nothing bothers ginger, here in Virginia. I had zero insect, animal, or disease damage on this little crop of ginger.
This is tough to clean! 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.
Conclusion.
This year, I took the standard advice for growing ginger in a non-tropical climate, and sprouted it around February 1.
This turned out to be a near-total waste of time, because ginger won’t grow unless it’s kept really warm. Specifically, warmer than I keep the inside of my house, in the winter.
As a result of their stubborn non-growth, I transplanted my pitiful ginger sprouts to containers, outside, in June. After they’d been more-or-less in suspended animation since they sprouted in February.
And that worked spectacularly well. Assuming you want immature ginger root. Which I now know that I do.
Without the thick skin and woody fibers of the mature root, immature ginger is just a whole lot easier to cook with. Instead of having to peel it and grate it, you just wash it and slice it. It’s soft enough and non-fibrous enough to go through the “slicer” section of a garlic press.
I’ve never grown ginger before, but a pound per square foot of container is an adequate yield from my standpoint. That’s as good a yield as any root crops I grow in my back yard. With the added bonus that the ginger plants are decorative, and that nothing in this region bothers it. No bugs, no deer damage, no fungi or other plant diseases.
It’s a pain to have to grow it in containers. But I consider that mandatory, as the soil in this region never reaches the 90F and up that ginger likes.
I’ll be growing this again next year.
