turmeric is a spice that is easy to grow and provides excellent health benefits
in today's episode we look at how to plant harvest and use fresh tumeric to
prepare turmeric powder which is used as a spice so sit back and enjoy as we take
you through this journey so let's look at what kind of soil is good for
planting turmeric now I use the standard potting mix which is comprised of peat
moss perlite or vermiculite and a lot of compost and it works very well for
planting turmeric now you can also reuse your existing potting soil or potting
mix and add some extra peat moss or coco coir to enrich your soil and this
forms a very good mix for growing turmeric
it retains enough water and at the same time it also provides excellent drainage
and there are two ways to pronounce turmeric you can pronounce it as turmeric
or turmeric now both these pronunciations are absolutely correct so
don't worry about pronouncing it either as turmeric or turmeric
and now let's look at some different planting techniques you can plant
store-bought turmeric I usually try to buy organic turmeric or the ones that
you get from the farmers market which are fresh and ready to be planted so all
you need to do is pick out some nice-looking tubers and then just plant
them in your pot just like that you can even plant turmeric directly in
the soil in the ground or in the raised beds and generally the volume of your
harvest would be a lot more when you're planting this in raised beds or in the
ground compared to planting turmeric in containers
you can also plant turmeric plants from two birds from an existing plant so
let's say you harvested some turmeric plants and after your harvest you will
be left with the root of the plant and you can just put the root inside the
soil just like that and it will grow into a new plant so this is also an easy
way to plant turmeric there is another way to plant turmeric which is to use the
child plant from the mother plant now when your turmeric plant becomes larger
it's going to send out some more plants around the base of the main plant and
these can be planted as a separate plant
now if you're planning to grow your turmeric in containers make sure you
choose a large container here we have chosen a large container which has about
seven to ten gallons of soil and we'll be planting about three plants in this
container so as you can see here you need to space out your plants well
and make sure that you plant your turmeric in either full Sun which is
preferred or in partial Sun so make sure your turmeric plants get at least about
six hours of sunlight a day and this will help the plant grow very well and
for you to harvest great quality turmeric from your plants
and now let's look at some ways to care for your turmeric plant now your turmeric
plant doesn't really need any fertilizers or nutrients if you use good
quality compost and a good quality potting mix your plant will grow very
well make sure you water your plants very well at least in the beginning
stages of the growth of the plant on hot sunny days you may want to check and
water your plants once a day or at least once in two days
when you have cloudy weather or cool weather you can water your plants about
two times a week or three times a week depending on how dry your soil is
now if you do want to use a fertilizer you can use an all-purpose fertilizer
the turmeric plant will grow very well and very vigorously if you use a
all-purpose fertilizer that will provide a lot of nutrients the basic nutrients
to the plants but I have grown turmeric plants without any fertilizers and
they've grown really well as you can see here, a well grown turmeric plant will have
nice vibrant leaves just like you see here and it will grow very well during
the warm season which is from March onwards till about September and as you
can see here you can mulch your turmeric plants as well and now let's look at the
harvest now you can have harvests that are very small like what you see here
this was planted in a five-gallon container and as you can see here the
harvest doesn't look very big but it's still a decent harvest now if you plant
your turmeric plants in the raised beds like we did here you can see that the
harvest is a lot better and we were able to harvest a lot of turmeric when we
planted these plants in the raised bed or in the ground and this is how a
typical harvest should look like you should have enough turmeric to use for
whatever purpose you need your turmeric for and here we're going to be using our
turmeric to prepare turmeric powder so once the turmeric is nicely washed you
may want to just dry it a little bit to the extent where you can see that they
have turned slightly brown light brown in color
and once that is done you need to peel them now if you don't peel your turmeric
before you create turmeric powder you're gonna have to turmeric powder that is not
very yellow in color it's gonna be more like reddish brown but once you peel the
turmeric you dry them in the Sun for about a few days it usually takes about
five to seven days you can even use a dehydrator if you have one to dry them
quickly but I just use the sun dried method and it works really well and here
you can see after five days of drying in the Sun the turmeric has shriveled and
dried out to a state where it can be converted into turmeric powder
now you need a very powerful blender to make sure that you get fine turmeric
powder we are using a Blendtec here this is probably one of our best investments
as a food processor or a blender and it's amazing quality and it can pretty
much make any kind of powder it's pretty amazing
I'll provide a link to this product in the video description so that if you
want to buy this product you can buy it from Amazon
and here you can see that after it's being converted into a powdered state
the turmeric powder looks very vibrant very yellow and if you had kept the peel
on this would have looked more like a reddish yellow color or a reddish brown
color but you can see here this fresh turmeric looks absolutely amazing and it
smells absolutely amazing and it also tastes great
so all we do is just scoop out the turmeric powder from the blender that we used and
this turmeric powder can be stored for a long time
you can use turmeric powder in all sorts of dishes you can even add them to your
smoothies you can make turmeric lattes there are a lot of ways you can use
turmeric powder for and home grown fresh turmeric powder is absolutely great
tasting and I highly recommend that you try growing turmeric and converting it to
your powder at home if you enjoyed this video do check out these two videos as
well one video is on growing turmeric and harvesting it and the other video talks
about Moringa which is also a superfood we hope you enjoyed this video we'll see
you again soon happy gardening