This year, I planted everything from spinach to tomatoes to cucumbers and very little came up. It's past growing season so it's a little bit late to start planting seeds again. But I am having luck with is things like scallions and garlic greens.
I have been using a lot of ginger and I love cooking with it. I noticed a chunk of ginger that I had sitting next to my garlic had not been used in a little while and I one of the bulbs had a little green toothpick shaped protrusion on the end of it.
I planted it with that green part sticking out and a marvelous plant came up in no time with huge green leaves. it was so beautiful I didn't want to think about harvesting it.
The larger leaves come out like a very large toothpick. Then they unroll and change into lush jungle like leaves. These are now the plants I love the most in my garden.
Today I harvested one to see how much Ginger was underneath. It has been about 6 months that this one has been growing. I have six or seven of them so this one is just a status check. Besides, I was out of ginger.
What you see above is a cross-section of the stem and the root section (on the right). The stem almost seems like an onion in the way that it has layers. Onions are graduated as you peel back the layers. You may have noticed that an onion may have the dry part of the skin and as you peel it around it gets greener. The next layer will be a green section on one side and as you peel it it turns white. This stem stock looks that way.
Every time that I purchase ginger, it has a thick skin, like bark, all around it which must be removed before using it to cook. Compare that to what you see below.
Here we have the same root stalk standing upright, upside down actually, and you can see that there's no hard, flaky skin on the ginger itself. I haven't used any of this because I just harvested it recently. Like potatoes, I believe that outer skin dries out to protect the fruit. So I want to use this quickly before it forms a crust, of sorts, on it.
Here's a close up.
These are some of the other ginger plants they still have growing. They are about chest high from the ground up. Something in my garden is eating some of the leaves, but that will not affect the outcome or usable ginger underground.
These are planted in a fairly large pot about 3 ft long and 3/4 of a foot thick. I was not expecting a huge plant. These were some of the first that I planted so they are a little bit crowded.
Here's another look at the two pieces that I cut so you can get an idea of the rest of the root system that is around the usable ginger.
The usable ginger, the larger pieces that you see as part of the root structure, is smaller than what I get when I buy a piece of Ginger at the produce store. I have not cut them apart yet or tried them. I want to add them to a recipe as I would with store-bought ginger when I do cut them. I did taste the longer thicker pieces of root and they don't taste bad but they don't have a very strong ginger flavor. I tried the center part of the stem that you see and it's the same thing. It tastes like ginger but not really strong. I'm not sure if it's usable or not in recipes, but I'm glad that I pulled the plant up so that I know what ginger root looks like at 6 months. I will probably let the other plans grow until they hit a year old.
Something I know for sure. I will not be hurting for ginger in the near future. It was a worthwhile experience and a bonus to have a lush beautiful plant in my garden in the meantime. Give me your comments or thoughts on this post. Thanks for reading!