Ginger Growing Calendar: Eight to Ten Months, Start to Harvest

The season is longer than your garden's

Ginger needs eight to ten months above about 55F (13C) to make mature rhizomes. Very few temperate gardens offer that outdoors, so growing ginger successfully in a cool climate is mostly a matter of manufacturing the missing weeks at each end, indoors, rather than hoping for a good summer.

Count backwards from your first frost date. Subtract eight months, and if the answer falls in the middle of winter, the outdoor part of the season cannot do the job on its own. That is not a reason to give up; it is the reason to start indoors in late winter and grow in a pot you can move.

Late winter: sprouting indoors

Start eight to ten weeks before your last frost date, and earlier if your summer is short. Sit the rhizomes on damp coir at 77F (25C) and wait for the buds to push. This is the cheapest six weeks of growing season you will ever buy, because it happens while the garden is still too cold to do anything.

Once the tips are half an inch (1 cm) long, pot the pieces into a wide shallow pot filled two thirds with free-draining compost and keep them warm and bright indoors. By the time it is safe to go outside the plant already has shoots up and a working root system.

1. Set the tray going Eight to ten weeks before your last frost, sit the rhizomes on damp coir at 75 to 80F (24 to 27C), covered loosely. Check weekly, keep barely damp.
2. Pot up when tips show At half an inch (1 cm) of sprout, plant two inches (5 cm) deep in a wide pot filled two thirds full. Keep it at 70F (21C) or above.
3. Harden off before it goes out Over a week, give it increasing time outdoors in a sheltered spot. Ginger sulks visibly at any sudden change.

Spring into summer: the main growing months

Move outside only once nights stay above 55F (13C), which is usually well after the last frost rather than on it. From then until late summer the plant does all its real work: shoots multiply, the clump thickens, and the rhizomes spread sideways just under the surface.

The jobs through these months are the routine ones, done consistently: water when the top inch (2.5 cm) dries, feed every two to three weeks, mound over the clump twice, and keep the plant out of the fiercest afternoon sun. Consistency matters more than any individual intervention.

Late summer and autumn: the two harvest decisions

From about four months you can start taking young pink-tipped rhizomes from the edge of the clump while the plant carries on growing. That is the decision point where a cool-climate grower often does best: take young ginger as the summer ends rather than gambling the whole clump on an autumn that may turn cold early.

If you are going for the mature harvest, stop feeding six to eight weeks out, let the leaves yellow and collapse, then dry the soil off for two to three weeks before lifting. Lift before the first frost whatever the leaves look like.

1. Four months on Take young rhizomes from one side of the clump if you want them. No more than a quarter of the plant, and cover the roots straight back up.
2. Six to eight weeks before lifting Stop feeding. Rhizomes still growing hard at lifting bruise easily and store badly.
3. As the leaves yellow Reduce watering, then stop. Two to three weeks of drying soil is what firms the skin for storage.
4. Lift on a dry day Fork in a foot (30 cm) out and lever the clump up whole. Cut tops to an inch (2.5 cm) and cure for seven to ten days in warm shade.

Winter: keeping a plant over to next year

In a frost-free climate ginger can simply stay in the ground, going dormant as the foliage dies back and re-sprouting when the soil warms. Withhold water through the dormant period, because a resting rhizome in wet soil is the classic way to lose a plant that survived the whole season.

Where frost occurs, either lift and store cured rhizomes at 55 to 60F (13 to 16C) for replanting, or bring the whole pot indoors, let it die back, keep the compost almost dry and somewhere above 55F (13C), and start watering again in late winter. A pot overwintered this way starts the next season several weeks ahead of a fresh rhizome.

Keep one page per season with the sprouting date, the date it went outside, the date of the first shoot, the harvest date, and the weight planted against the weight lifted. Three seasons of that will tell you more about growing ginger where you live than any general guidance can, because it measures your own warmth rather than someone else's.