Food-Gardening Lessons From A Wartime Victory Garden

How to Grow Ginger Indoors

Whether you cook something sweet or savory, fresh ginger (Zingiber officinale) has a traditional place at the winter table. And, potted ginger is so easy to grow! Contained gingers grow fast for fresh, flavorful roots in any season.

Growing Ginger

Ginger is wonderfully easy to grow as a potted house plant for a sunny window. Start with a spacious container with bottom drainage. Then fill the pot with fertile Black Gold Natural & Organic Potting Mix, leaving at least 2 inches of headspace at the top of the pot for watering. Ginger likes soil with a slightly acid pH between 5.5 and 6.5, so consider adding a little Black Gold Peat Moss Plus to decrease soil pH.

Plants or roots don’t need to be planted deeply; place them just a few inches below the soil surface.  When planting ginger root, be sure to set it with its horn-like buds facing upwards. Lightly press down the soil to ensure good soil-to-root contact and water moderately, keeping roots just moist. Fertilize ginger monthly with an all-purpose water-soluble fertilizer, provide high light, and keep ginger plants warm and humidity high. They don’t appreciate dry air or temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sourcing Ginger Plants

Store-bought roots from organic grocery stores will work very well or you can purchase plants from retail greenhouses, like Logee’s and Stokes Tropicals.  Just be sure you are choosing culinary ginger (Zingiber officinale) rather than flower ginger plants and that it is organically grown. There are many cultivated varieties of culinary ginger, but most are only available in Asian agricultural markets.

Harvesting Ginger Root

Happy ginger plants will begin to develop generous, fragrant, fleshy roots (rhizomes) that spread outward to fill the sides of the pot. Cut off outer rhizomes for cooking, and leave plenty of plant in the pot to generate lots more ginger for cooking.

 

Freshly harvested ginger is wonderfully pungent and delicious.

About JESSIE KEITH

Plants are the lens Jessie views the world through because they’re all-sustaining. (“They feed, clothe, house and heal us. They produce the air we breathe and even make us smell pretty.”) She’s a garden writer and photographer with degrees in both horticulture and plant biology from Purdue and Michigan State Universities. Her degrees were bolstered by internships at Longwood Gardens and the American Horticultural Society. She has since worked for many horticultural institutions and companies and now manages communications for Sun Gro Horticulture, the parent company of Black Gold. Her joy is sharing all things green and lovely with her two daughters.

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