Tag: growing turmeric

 

 

The goal here is to force some ginger root.  To do that, you put the root in a warm, moist (micro) environment, and encourage it to sprout.  Typically, you do that warm-moist thing indoors, with a planting tray on a “seedling heat mat”.

On my first attempt, I ended up cooking my ginger roots.  Per just-prior post.  Soil temps approached 110F, in what I think was its thermal steady state.

This post is about my second attempt at sprouting ginger root. Continue reading Post G24-003, addendum 2: Starting ginger root, second try.

 

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.

 

 

Above you see the start of some ginger and turmeric plants.  These are just a few ounces of off-the-shelf organic ginger and turmeric roots, from the grocery store, cut/broken into pieces, soaked for a bit, pressed into some damp potting mix, covered with more potting mix, then left on a 20-watt seed starting heat mat to sprout.

I ought to start seeing green sprouts emerge in a week or two.

I admit, these were an impulse item.  I was at the grocery store, getting some potatoes (for chitting) and sweet potatoes (to get going, for slips for planting), and I noticed the ginger root.  I’ve heard that it can be grown in my area (hardiness zone 7).  So I picked some up.  And if I’m doing ginger, I might as well do turmeric, as they are close relatives and have similar growing requirements.

My advice:  Before you start these plants, start with a little math.  My growing season is maybe 6 months long.  (The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists my growing season as 186 days (reference).  Most sources say that ginger requires a 10-month growing season.  So, one way or the other, absent a greenhouse, these are going to be houseplants for about four months. One way or the other. Before I can plant them out in the garden.

I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to manage that.  But rumor has it that these will sprout in their own good time, so it’ll be a matter of some weeks before I’ll need to start dealing with that.  If they sprout at all.

I mean, how hard can it be, right? Plus, all that delicious turmeric ale.

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Addendum:  Sweet potatoes

Finishing off my root/tuber/rhizome starts are my sweet potatoes.

I have sung the praises of the lowly sweet potato elsewhere (Post G23-065).  It’s food that can look after itself.  Once you get them started, you prune them to keep them from taking over. And dig up some food at the end of the season.

The only hard part is coaxing a handful of sweet potatoes to sprout, so that you can plant the sprouts.  And even that isn’t hard, it just seems to take forever.  Plop a few sweet potatoes into a box full of potting soil, keep it warm and moist, and wait.  And wait.  And wait.

So I start my sweet potatoes now — around Groundhog Day.  Which seems ridiculous, given that they really don’t want to go out into the garden before May 1 or so, at the earliest.  But it really does seem to take them months, every year, to begin producing slips.  So in they go.

Aside from remembering to water them every once in a while, this is zero effort.  You just have to remember to do it early enough, every year.