Artemisia VulgarisI’m going to be #harvesting my first #crop of windowsill #ginger soon, is that something people would like to know about?
(blathered endlessly at someone last night who asked me a simple question and now I feel awkward)
I planted three small withered lumps of ginger (each about the size of my thumb) with a green “eye” apiece in the early summer. I had read they like very filtered sunlight and good drainage, so I added a lot of grit to the compost, gravel at the bottom of the pot, and kept it in a window with no direct sunlight. Plant so the green tip of the nodule just breaks the soil and water fairly frequently. The leaves are going brown now, and it’s winter, so harvest time.
Quite a small harvest in the end. A lot more root than rhizome. Maybe 3 times as much ginger as I planted, maybe a bit more. Still, the effort was minimal. So I’m happy enough. They like to grow along rather than down, so a long rectangular windowsill pot would likely have a better ratio. #ginger #windowsill #WindowsillGardening #Growing
Apparently you can cook with the leaves and stalks too. I’ll let you know if it works out well.
Made a stir fry by chopping up some stems and leaves very fine and frying with noodles and shredded cabbage. Very good, milder and slightly more vegetal in flavour than root ginger.
helplessduck@CommonMugwort Nice! Were the stalks super tough? I love using the leaves to flavor soup.
@helplessduck Fibrous for sure, but less so than, say, lemon grass
@CommonMugwort I'll have to try that. I love lemongrass. I'm not afraid of fibrous.
Josh Grams@CommonMugwort Yeah, a wider pot might have helped? Some people call them "hands" because they tend to grow out in a wide fan-like pattern with stalks growing up from them. We didn't do any this year, but my recollection from the last couple years is that they like a lot of heat and they take a looong time.
And you're supposed to hill it when it starts having pink tips just at/under the surface of the soil: we didn't know that the first year and it seems to be important. I think the closer together it's planted, the more it wants to grow up rather than out? If you've searched, you've probably found Biker Dude in HI; he was very friendly and helpful for us, though I think we had ordered from him, so...
@CommonMugwort idk, we're pretty new at this also: I want to talk to the other local farmer who has been doing it for several years and experimenting with spacing and such, once we really get into winter and things slow down a bit.
@JoshGrams Thanks, that’s useful. I joke st used some bits I found in the back of the vegetable drawer. No idea what or where HI is 😊
@CommonMugwort Ah, sorry, HI is the two-letter state code for Hawaii: I should have spelled that out. Biker Dude is this guy/company: http://www.hawaiianorganicginger.com/ IIRC there's a lot of good stuff in the Growing Guide section...
@JoshGrams Thank you 😊. I’m in Europe so I don’t really pay attention to sites in far away places, but I will check out the growing guide.