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Did you know that you don’t have to just buy ginger in the store, but can grow it year-round in the comfort of your home? If you start growing ginger at home yourself, you’ll avoid buying ginger in the store, where we usually get ginger imported from China, which does contain many beneficial substances, but certainly doesn’t have the same potency as ginger we grow here ourselves.
Ginger
Ginger is a very useful plant, especially during the winter period, but it certainly won’t go to waste for the rest of the year either. If you start growing it in these months, you’ll be perfectly prepared for the winter months when you and your family are surprised by a runny nose, cough and fever.
How to grow ginger?
Try to obtain ginger that was grown locally instead of the Chinese one. If you can’t manage that, the Chinese one is certainly acceptable too, because once you grow your own ginger from it, the pesticide content in it will drop significantly.
1) First, get a suitable ginger root that is free of wrinkles and has small buds (eyes) at the ends of the shoots. Preferably one whose ends are starting to turn green.
2) Soak it in water for the first night
3) Cut the ginger so that each piece has this greenish shoot at the end. It’s advantageous if the ginger has at least 3-4 of these eyes, because you’ll have a better chance of final success.
4) Prepare the soil. It’s best to mix garden soil with compost in a 1:1 ratio
5) Ginger loves slightly more acidic soil, which you can check with litmus paper. You should measure a pH between 6.1 and 6.5.
6) Then choose a place to grow the ginger. Preferably a lightly shaded spot where the sun is present only for part of the day. With an ideal temperature of 22 – 25 degrees.
7) Choose a flowerpot about 30 cm high.
8) Place the ginger into the soil and cover with soil so that the green shoots are pointing upwards.
9) Individual ginger pieces should be about 20 cm apart from each other.
10) It’s important that the soil drains moisture well, so the ginger doesn’t rot. Therefore you should water only after the soil dries out.
11) Continue regular watering and remove any weeds that appear in the pot.
12) After some time the ginger stalks will turn yellow and die. At that point stop watering the ginger.
13) Once the stalks have died, you can dig the ginger out of the soil in about 8 months; it can possibly be harvested already after 4 months.
14) You can consume the ginger fresh or store it in a cool, dark place for later use.
