Last year I stumbled onto a fun experiment.
When I started growing Turmeric and Ginger outdoors I noticed they only grew well in the summer, because they are tropical plants. Harvesting them in Autumn after a storm knocked the plants dead was a miserable, messy chore, because the soil stayed be too wet and cold to handle. It felt like a rushed mess. The rhizomes would already be rotten with holes from worm and bug damage.
So I decided to instead try growing them as indoor plants.
The outdoor crop was totally worthless, and quickly dried up into husk shells, so I started over with new rhizomes from the store. After a few weeks of coaxing buds with some added warmth and moisture, they were planted with regular potting mix, charcoal, and some fertilizer.
After a few months they flourished, and one even made flowers.
They drink a lot of water quickly from the soil, so I usually immersed the entire pot under fast running water to fully soak the soil. I would do this once or twice a week.
When the leaves started to look tired and spent, and new leaves stopped forming, I stopped watering them completely to prepare them for harvesting. Often times I cut up the yellowed leaves and sprinkled the chaff as a top litter layer over the soil. Sort of my way of recycling the plant and nutrients back in.
The Turmeric, above shows the three mothers, which are the original rhizomes that became the growth stalks. Altogether I counted 15 new rhizomes, plus the three mothers which might still be usable. Many of the rhizomes snapped off from the mother with the lightest force.
Harvesting was a breeze, and I could easily take my time flaking off dry soil and roots to separate from the crop, while enjoying a rare sunny winter day outside.
The bigger ones have a deeper orange color, while the smaller ones were more of a golden yellow. All are edible and very healthy. The mothers are more fibrous and probably are less edible, but do have chance of resprouting into plants and growing new rhizomes again.
Currently I am letting the turmeric rhizomes rest a bit inside the layers of leaf chaff I collected. In a week I will try coaxing them back to life with renewed moisture, and then replant indoors to replicate the experiment.
The ginger plants still have many green leaves, so I will wait a few more weeks before harvesting it.
