How to start growing turmeric and ginger for your garden 2023

Hey guys, so today I am going to show you on how I am growing my turmeric this year. So what you're going to need is some obvious turmeric pieces. You can get this from your grocery store. Make sure that they are firm and fresh looking. They don't look dried and shriveled up. And inspect them to see if they have like little buds on them. You'll see it has like little green tops like that. And I'm also growing ginger. So make sure they're plump. Okay, you don't want them to be dry. And also make sure they have like little buds like this as well. Alright, so what you're going to do is break your ginger apart or your turmeric apart if it's too large. Usually turmeric is already small so you don't need to do that. But sometimes the ginger comes in these huge clumps. So I just broke it apart and I gave these a 24 hour to 36 hour soak. Okay, I actually put them on my heat mat. But if you don't have a heat mat that is fine. If your house is warm that is fine. That's all you need. Okay, or you could put it in a warm place. For the soil I'm doing a mixture of seed starter mix and worm castings. And I sterilized the soil with some boiling hot water. You want to mix this in really well and just kind of let the steam kill off anything that might be in the soil that can interfere with the growth of the ginger. I'm using a baking pan with a lid that you get from the dollar store. If you want to grow anything this year and need a mini greenhouse to start seeds, get you a baking pan like this with a lid and some bath cups. And that's your seed starting tray just so you know. Alright, now that the 36 hours or the 24 to 36 hours has passed I'm going to remove the turmeric and the ginger from their containers and plant them out in the tray. I'm doing half turmeric and half ginger. Because of space I'm using my old greenhouse. In this video I actually upgraded to a bigger shelf now. But you know, you do what works best for your space. But I just used the half the baking pan for the turmeric and the other half for the ginger. It was more than enough space. I decided once they sprout and grow I will take my time and separate them as best as I can without damaging too many roots. I did try to grow turmeric and ginger last year and I tried different methods from other people like the paper towel in the ziploc bag or paper towel in a container and it just did not work for me. So soaking them overnight or for at least a day and a half and then putting them in soil and covering them worked really great. You know turmeric and ginger are tropical plants. They love heat and humidity so I took that into account when starting them this way. This is how my ginger looked. I took it out of the water and this is how the buds look. As you can see they got like a little puffier. They started to grow so that's a great sign that they're ready to go into the soil. So I kind of just jiggled them into the soil. They're going to touch the bottom of the pan just a tiny bit but you don't want them to touch the whole bottom of the pan. You want at least about one inch of soil underneath the ginger. So you see how the buds look. So these look really good, really healthy and I'm just going to put them in the soil and as you guys can see the soil is very moist. There are no drainage holes in this pan, none at all. Just a baking pan with a cover. That's all you're going to need. Some soil. I recommend getting a seed starting mix, sterilizing it. If you're going to use potting mix really really make sure that you get boiling hot water all over the potting mix because most potting mix comes with fungus gnats and that will just create a disaster in your house with your plants that you already have and with the ginger. So this is how it looks once everything is in the pan and I'm just going to cover this with about one inch of or half inch to one inch of soil or seed starter mix. Another thing you can do to prevent fungus gnats is to put a thin layer of sand over the soil once you're done. I didn't do it with this because I kept the cover on the pan for seven days straight so I didn't have any issues with fungus gnats. But if you already have fungus gnats in your house, put a thin layer of sand over the soil. This would make the area not as inviting for fungus gnats. So this is about four or five days after starting the ginger and the turmeric and I just took pictures and videos as it grew because I wanted to see the progress. So I kind of confused myself. I thought the larger sprouts were ginger and the smaller sprouts were the turmeric but actually the larger sprouts are the turmeric and the smaller sprouts are the ginger. So here one of the sprouts broke in half and this is when I was like okay no more cover for the pan. They were breaking. They were starting to push the cover off. So at this point I left the cover off and just kept an eye on it making sure you know fungus gnats weren't taking over everything. So fungus gnats are just these little bugs that eat feed on the fungus in the soil. They lay their eggs in there and then their little larvae chew and eat away at the fungus and the roots of your plants and then it can like stunt their growth or kill the plants. That's why you see that yellow sticky trap over there. I get those from Amazon. I'll put a link down below to the sticky traps I use. I have two kinds that one that you put into the soil and one that you hang up. So this is how they look. Very very pretty plants. I just waited. I think I waited about I want to say I waited about two weeks till they got really large and I was like okay time to transplant. I wish I had kind of put them in cups a little bit sooner but that's fine. The only reason I'm saying that is because their roots got a little bit entangled but that's okay. I took my time and took them apart. So this is about I want to say day 13 day 14 and you see how large they got and at this point they have been on the heat mat the entire time. The entire time they have been on the heat mat because again they're tropical plants. They like heat and humidity. So this is how the roots look. These are the ginger plants on this side and the turmeric is on the other side. So to gently separate the roots I decided to soak all the soil with warm water not hot like very lightly warm water just to get it nice and saturated so I could just take my time and gently separate the roots so I'm not breaking roots and causing too much trauma to the plants. So this is how they look and as I take them apart I'm just going to inspect them see if some need to be cut in half see if some need some more time in the pan. So this is how they look and it's super easy and this is about 14 days two weeks of sprouting and growing them and once you have them potted up I'll talk about that in a minute but once you have them potted up they grow horizontally so they like to grow like across so you don't have to get like a super super deep pan for them you know they like to kind of grow across if that makes sense. All right so this one here needed to be cut it was just too many sprouts in one clump and I needed it to fit in a plastic cup you see the blue cup in front of you these have holes underneath them and this is how the size I'm using for each cup okay making sure it has at least more than two three buds on each one so that I know it's going to produce more ginger as it grows. So I'm putting it in the cups again the cups have drainage holes on the bottom make sure all cups containers anything you use to put plants in have drainage holes plants need to be able to drain excess water or as if they stay in water their roots will rot and they will die okay and I'm just adding the soil on top this is the same soil mix of seed starter mix and worm casting okay and I also added some perlite to help with drainage so I'm potting them up like this okay and once potted up I'm going to add some sand on top and this is to help with the fungus gnat this is just play sand you can use you know whatever sand you have available not outside sand that's in the yard don't do that but this is how they looked when I first finished them the same day I potted them up I brought them upstairs the tray I'm using is actually a chicken tray this this had chicken in it at one point from the butcher shop or whatever and I wash them out and I use them for my plants so this is day one of me potting them up up potting them separating them and this is about I want to say about a month and a half later all right so I'm pretty much ready for this year's growing season with my ginger I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did give this video a thumbs up and I'll see you very soon in another video bye guys