Ginger: Zingiber officinale

(ginger: zingiber officinale)
december 2009
carrboro, north carolina

What to do with this?

Ginger will be another learning experience - how to prune or trim it, how to harvest it, the whole nine yards. Ginger belongs to the genus zingiber, which also includes turmeric, galangal, myoga, and cardamom; bananas belong to the same order of plants. The greater family also includes distant relatives like all the grasses and bromeliads. Ginger has a number of superficial resemblances to many of those relatives, both close and distant - foremost among them a very grassy, spreading habit of growth.

Many species of ginger are known for spectacular flowers, unfortunately culinary ginger is not one of those. If you love ginger, it won't matter to you much!

Watching this plant mature has been quite a treat. I purchased a large hand of ginger in September 2009, and put it on a shelf, taking care that it wasn't in direct sunlight (sunburn) or total darkness (mold growth). In about 3 or 4 weeks, it began to develop multiple shoots at the fingertips - short and fat, very pale whitish green in color, with a soft ginger smell, looking a bit like bamboo shoots. I left it alone for another week, until the shoots began to develop a deeper green color.

At this point, my ginger went into a large pot, filled with deep but quick-draining soil. It spent another month developing the rudiments of a root system - the ginger "root" actually isn't a root, but a rhizome that slowly spreads outward as shoot grow upwards, and fine roots develop downwards into the dirt. In mid-November, I put it in a humid bathroom, below a south facing window, with the bottom warmth of a central heating vent 2 feet below. Around Thanksgiving, it began its' upward growth, swiftly sending up 6 shoots. These grew to widely varying heights, with the three dominant shoots skyrocketing to 3 or 4 feet in a matter of 2 weeks, before settling in at that mature size. The green growth doesn't have much of a fragrance, and superficially, ginger looks a bit like a cross between corn and bamboo, but with fleshy/juicy stalks, unlike the hollow, notched stalks typical of grasses.