Grow Your Own Ginger

Go to the How To Video on YouTube

Ginger may be a tropical plant, but with a little bit of know-how, a small corner in your house for a few months, and then a little space on your deck or patio, you can easily grow your own in almost any part of the continental US.

​The ginger that you buy in the grocery store is fully mature and cured; it has a thick brown skin and keeps quite well for a long time under the right conditions. You can grow mature ginger, it just takes a lot longer - you have to overwinter it somewhere. But, honestly, you can buy mature ginger that's perfectly delicious in almost any market in America. You know what is really hard to find? Baby ginger. That's what you're looking at in the above picture. It has a super thin skin, is extra juicy and tender. It's pink and yellow. It's delicious. It's special, and it makes an amazing​ gift!

It's about the right time to start ginger, so I thought I'd share with you how easy it is! While there are dedicated growers out there from whom you can purchase certified ginger seed stock, you really just need to go to your grocery store. You are looking for ginger in the produce section that is smooth skinned, plump and firm, and indicates that it has a will to grow. You can buy organic or conventional, as long as it looks like it wants to grow. What does that mean? If the nodes on the ginger look like they are starting to swell and/or grow, you've got yourself a great specimen!

Conventional grocery store ginger with lots of growth points showing growth potential.

Bring them home and prepare a shallow tray with seed starting medium or some high-quality compost. Place the roots in the soil, just so they are covered. Moisten everything and put a cover on the tray. If you keep a really warm home, you should be good to go. Seventy-plus degrees will get those babies going. If your home is a bit cooler or you want to be sure to maximize your timing, put them on a seed starting mat. They're available for less than $20, and do a great job keeping them consistently warm. It takes a bit, but within four to six weeks, you should start seeing some green poking through! Add moisture as needed but be sure not to let them be soggy - all that does is lead to rot. 

The next step is to plant them in pots, covering them with about two inches of soil. I keep them in the trays until the worry of frost is gone. If you have an indoor area to keep the pots, go ahead and pot them up as soon as they sprout. You can plant them in the ground, but they need a long season, and if you live somewhere that you can be surprised by an early frost, you want to be able to move those pots in the garage if it gets too cold before you are ready to harvest.

The plants are beautiful while they are growing, lush and green. I love keeping them on my deck. They like a lot of watering, food, and sun. I've also learned that it is best if you plant them deeper in the pot to begin with and slowly add soil over their tops as they grow. This helps develop larger "hands" of ginger, versus encouraging the hands to keep spreading out sideways into many new hands.

Keep them watered and fed, and periodically add more dirt until your growing season comes to an end. Then it's harvest time! Trim the tops to about two inches (the leaves can be dried for tea, by the way). Pull the root ball out of the pot and carefully break it apart. Clean the ginger roots of soil and trim the stringy roots. Wash gently - the skin is very fragile, don't scrub! Let them dry and then keep refrigerated.

​Fresh baby ginger is quite perishable, so be prepared to gift it quickly, if giving it as a fresh item. If you want to make stuff from it before you gift it, then scrub the roots until the fibrous skin is basically gone, cut or break them into usable sized pieces, wrap each tightly in plastic wrap, and freeze. Frozen like this, the ginger lasts almost indefinitely.

Each of those pots in the picture above produced about one pound of baby ginger. It adds up quickly! Maybe you only need to grow it every few years to fulfill your needs. Again, the active time invested in this crop when growing it at this scale is pretty minimal. The most I've ever grown in one year was ten pots. It was easy and I had all the ginger I needed for my household uses and for all the gifting I could imagine! And imagine I did! In addition to fresh uses in cooking, I've made shelf stable gifts such as herbal teas, ginger sugar, ginger syrup, gingersnaps, gingerbread cutouts, ginger jellies, and spiced pear spread. I'm sure there will be more in the future. Ginger is so versatile and delicious; you just can't go wrong!

I've made a how-to video for you showcasing the different parts of growing ginger. You can find that video on my youtube channel.