We were too scared to mention this at the time, but we experienced some sort of cosmic event when it came to our ginger and turmeric this year. Call it a miracle or just some good karma… because those plants you saw looking all pretty and plump this past fall were on their death-bed a few months earlier.
I should back up first and remind you that Greg is a scientist at heart and he’s definitely not one to be afraid of experimenting (you can read more about that in our newsletter about Greg’s “moment of truth” here).
This past spring, he was doing his thing tweaking a few of our systems for growing our ginger and turmeric and things just totally backfired – one day we had 20 trays of bright green tall and sturdy ginger seedlings. And within 48 hrs, they all crashed.
There was no way to start over at that point. So, we started talking about throwing the trays of seedlings into the compost pile and preparing to break the bad news to you all. But before we did that, we took one last look…
The leaves were dead, the stalks were dead, the base of the plant looked dead, but on the edges of some of the roots there were a few tiny specks of new growth. We decided to take the risk and we slogged through the most painful transplanting experience EVER, knowing in our hearts, that it was all a lost cause.
With very low expectations, we waited. We took extra good care of the plants, watering them obsessively and modulating the temperature in the hoop house more carefully than ever. And sure enough, over time, the death above ground decayed and as luck would have it, new growth popped up in it’s place.
It was a stressful growing season from there. The plants put on growth, but it always seemed to us that they were behind schedule. We did our absolute best for them every day, but we had lots of come-to-jesus talks (many right before we fell asleep at night) about how we needed to keep trying, but also keep the expectations low.
The first harvest was in mid-September (over 7 months from when we first planted the seeds and 4 months from when they were on their death-bed) and those ginger roots we worried about all season long? They were gigantic, with a yield almost 50% bigger than the previous year! It turned out to be a record-breaking harvest for us.
The lesson from this experience is one that I’m absolutely sure we’ll need to re-learn many times over. And that’s that there are mysteries in this world, that we can’t always understand or explain. And that hope and persistence sometimes allow absolutely amazing things to happen. Now we just need to figure out what we need to do to repeat this next year…
Your Farmers,
Jenney and Greg