hello friends in today's episode we will look at two ways you can easily plant
ginger in your garden so in this popular video that I posted last year a
lot of you have asked me to demonstrate the actual planting technique and that's
exactly what I will be doing in this video so in the first method that we will
be seeing today what you do is you take a nice big chunk of ginger and just
plant it into your soil like that now this method is good if you're ginger is
fresh so you can be the best judge just look at your ginger piece and if its fresh
enough then just go ahead and plant the ginger and in my experience May is the
best time to plant ginger for a fall or late fall harvest
now
it might take some time for the ginger shoots to show up and that's pretty
normal depending on the temperatures in your area
it might take up to 30 days for the ginger plans to come out they usually
come out sooner though in about two weeks or so now the potting mix that I'm using here for
growing the ginger is about 90% compost and ginger is one plant that really
loves compost I mean if you could grow it and straight-up compost and I'm sure that
ginger would still grow very well but I usually mix in some potting mix
and some perlite as well as you can see here but the best I've grown is in about 90%
compost and some potting mix and it's very important that your ginger plant
receives adequate water so I'll be doing a video on my drip irrigation system
sometime soon but you can see here this plant has a nice a drip irrigation
system setup and it needs a lot of water especially during the hot summer months
so it's late October and it's harvest time so I would suggest letting the
ginger plant grow to at least about three to four feet before you begin
harvesting your plant now you can feel around the base of the plant and see if
the ginger has developed in this case I'm just gonna pull off this ginger
plant because it's been a few months as I planted it and it is ready for harvest
now if you look at the soil again it's really rich, very nice soil with a
lot of compost and this is exactly the kind of soil that you need to grow
ginger if you want to improve drainage you can add some more perlite or
vermiculite but even otherwise this is the kind of soil that ginger loves know
when you use a lot of compost, worm castings etc there'll be a lot of
weeds that will grow in your container as well now that's perfectly fine you can just
get rid of the weeds. weeds in your soil actually mean that your soil is very fertile
and very nice and that's why all those weeds are growing now you can see
here the ginger has been harvested and after washing this is how the ginger
looks like this is the baby ginger fresh ginger that you can use and some of you
had asked me what about the dried brown ginger that we find at the store
well that's because stores need to preserve the ginger on their shelves for
quite some time which is why they use ginger that is dried the skin has
dried and it stays on the shelf for a longer time so if you have any ginger
stalks left you can just plant them back and they will do just fine however I
noticed that the best time to grow ginger is really between spring and fall
and anything later will not give you good results
now as a part of this video I also wanted to show you what is not a good time to harvest
ginger so I had to clear this bed because of other reasons for my garden
however you can notice that this ginger is not completely formed and the plant
is about two feet in height and as you can see you're clearly the ginger roots
are very small
this is the original ginger that grew into this big plant and this will give
you a good idea on how the ginger plant grows however the ginger itself is
pretty small as you can see this is still perfectly usable you can still use
the ginger you can even use the leaves and stems
it tastes just like the ginger root and this'll just give you an idea not to
harvest your ginger earlier than you should
now our second method of growing
ginger or planting ginger is the soaking method
use this method if your ginger
is dry or you think that it's not looking fresh or if you have doubts in
your mind whether it'll grow or not so you basically just immerse the ginger for
about three hours in a bowl of water before you plant and after about three
hours the ginger pieces would have soaked in all the water and become ready to
plant so you just plant it like the method we used earlier just dig in a
little bit of soil and then cover it now in this case I'm using the 511
potting mix instead of the ninety percent compost mix the 511 mix is
good if you do not have a lot of compost but you do have peat most
perlite and wood chips but remember that for this mix you need to add a
complete vegetable fertilizer so that your plants get some nutrition now you
can transplant ginger plants when they're very small now I do not recommend
transplanting big ginger plans at all however as you can see here if they're
really small you can just dig them out of the container
and try to leave a little bit of soil around them now in this case our soil is
so fluffy and so lose that all the soil around the roots have fallen off you can
still look around the ginger plant and make sure that the transplants are ready
and then gently separate them if you have really big pieces of ginger just
use a knife I'm just going to try to break these two pieces apart and then
plant them in separate areas now by splitting the ginger root into multiple pieces
you're allowing the plants to have much more area to grow and that's always a
good technique because you'll have much healthier plants that way and here the
ginger plants that we transplanted that are growing in the whisky barrel
container and they're growing pretty well however I highly recommend that you plant
your ginger plants in April or May and that way you have a nice long growing season
for a very nice fall harvest of ginger so I hope you liked this episode and let
me know if you have any comments
give us a thumbs up if you liked this video and I'll see you again soon
happy gardening