Living in cool temperate Lutruwita/Tasmania, tropical ginger isn’t something you hear of people growing often – but that doesn’t mean you can’t As soon as we built our greenhouse (see it here), it was one of the first crops we planted and recently, we did our first small harvest and are feeling very pleased with ourselves.

I just bought some nuggets of ginger from the local shops, they don’t need to be organic, chopped them up so each nugget had at least two eyes and popped them into some fertile, free-draining soil. The ‘eye’ refers to the little bumps on the ginger (see image below), this is where a new plant can sprout from and why you want at least two of them.

We planted the original nuggets in our Spring last year and check on them in Autumn – around 5/6 months later. Autumn is a common time to do some harvesting around the plant with ‘bandicooting’. This means you don’t lift the whole plant, instead you dig around the base of the plant and snap off mature nuggets for eating straight away. Basically you’re imitating a bandicoot – a small Australian fluffy mammal. When we checked on our crop in Autumn it was already large enough (on one plant) to do a small bit of bandicooting, but we left the majority to over-winter. Why?

As my Queensland mate, Jono taught me, the ginger develops a thicker skin and stronger taste over winter. You can then lift the whole plant in Spring, take what you want for eating and then re-plant some nuggets in the same place to continue the cycle. The only reason why you wouldn’t do this is if you have a tiny plant and want to “Grow it up” a bit first. In which case give it another season to mature.

You know the plant is ready to lift in Spring when the foliage has died back (as seen in image on the left above). If you dig under the mulch, you might also see the roots bulging out of the soil (above middle). When you lift the plant, see if you can recover the “mother” nugget, the original one you planted and from which all the other nuggets grew from. You can JUST see my mother nugget in one of my hands in the top right and some of the fresh root that grew from it. I always love seeing how something so little can produce so much.

Things to remember!

But all up, we’re stoked with how season one life with ginger in the garden has gone and will make it a permanent feature of the greenhouse. In terms of storing it, we’ll keep excess in the freezer and use as needed and a smaller amount in the fridge. I use lots of it daily in my hot tea and on my breaky of yoghurt, fruit and nuts. You can also just store it in the ground and bandicoot it as needed.

And a fun fact to leave you with…. I love ginger so much it was actually on my shortlist to name our daughter…