Herb of the Month

Ginger

Strictly speaking, ginger is of course a spice rather than a herb, but it is too useful a winter root to leave out, and you may be surprised to know it can be grown in cool temperate climates. Growing your own ginger also makes it easy to experiment with green (young) ginger as well as the more common older root.

Growing

Ginger has to be an indoor plant in the UK or anywhere that has frosts, as it can’t handle cold temperatures at all. It’s a tropical plant, and likes shelter, warmth, humidity, and rich, moist soil. It gets on very badly with direct sun, strong wind, and waterlogged soil, and is not at all frost-hardy.

To grow it, look for fresh ginger in the shops in late winter or early spring, and choose a piece with a ‘finger’ which has a small pyramidal bud growing at its end. Soak it overnight, then cut off at least 5cm from this piece, and bury it bud-up in a 20cm pot of compost. Put the pot in a warm, sunny place. It must be kept warm and moist during the growing season, and the soil should be rich and free-draining (moist but not waterlogged is good!). As it starts to grow, feed every 2-3 weeks, and pot it on into larger pots as it grows.

You can start harvesting it from about four months’ old, by digging at the side of a clump and breaking off the young, fresh rhizomes – these have a milder flavour than mature ginger (see below). In the autumn, once the leaves have died down, you can dig the whole thing up (easy if you’re growing in a container!) and break up the rhizomes. Replant a few for next year (pick the ones with good growing buds), and use the rest for cooking.

Culinary uses

In cooking, it’s the root of the plant that is used. The old root should be gathered when the stalk and leaves wither in autumn; the young roots can be harvested earlier, as above. Make sure not to harvest everything, or you won’t have a plant next year!

Ginger shows up a lot in Asian and Chinese cooking. Spinach or other greens flash fried with garlic and ginger are lovely, and you can use ginger in a stir fry. Young roots (rhizomes) have a milder flavour than older roots, and, unlike older roots, can be used unpeeled. Young ginger is also what is used for candied ginger or stem ginger in syrup. The young roots will be pink-tipped, and are also known as green ginger or stem ginger.

Medicinal uses

Ginger is often used to counteract nausea in various situations (including motion sickness, pregnancy nausea, and some studies suggest it may help with chemotherapy-induced nausea). It’s also used as an anti-inflammatory, and there’s evidence that it can help with arthritis. You can simply use it in cooking, or try chopping or grating it finely then steeping or boiling it in water to make a tea.