How to Grow Baby Ginger

I was recently on an information gathering trip to Central Florida, home of this country’s indoor foliage and tropical plant industry. Everywhere you turn there is a small nursery or greenhouse specializing in peace lilies, Christmas cactus, nepenthes, orchids, aglaonema, all sorts of palms and tropical shrubs. If you can imagine it in an interiorscape, a home, or a tropical landscape, it’s here.

And even though the focus of the trip was tropicals and foliage, I still ran into a grower doing some fun stuff with edibles.

The operation is called AgriStarts and they are primarily a tissue culture facility for indoor plants. (“Tissue culture,” by the way, is a technique to replicate plants from tiny, virus-free bits of other plants using a lab.) Recently, though, they’ve gotten into reproducing edibles. Their main edible plants are blueberry, blackberry and hops plants mainly for commercial growers but also for home gardener use. But they are also doing a good business in reproducing hard-to-find and niche crops.

That’s what brings me to baby ginger. AgriStarts has found there’s a growing demand for the smaller ginger rhizomes. My understanding is that baby ginger is the same crop as the larger ginger rhizomes you can purchase in the store. However, baby ginger is harvested sooner, in just 6 months or so, rather than the 11 months for the mature rhizome.

Growing Baby Ginger

GBecause it’s harvested sooner, baby ginger is not as spicy as the larger bulbs and still has a fairly thin skin. This skin doesn’t need to be peeled off, and that’s a good thing because the skin is where many of the nutrients are. Another benefit of harvesting sooner is it’s fresher and has a better color. Considering all of these characteristics, baby ginger is in high demand from people and businesses that make fresh mixed healthy juices and also by brewers making ginger beer.

Baby ginger can be grown from seed pieces—basically chunks of rhizomes like how you’d grow potatoes in your garden—but since AgriStarts sells small plants via online mail-order companies, it’s possible to skip the step of bringing the seed pieces out of dormancy. Plant the small baby ginger transplants directly into the ground when the soil’s temperature is consistently 50F or above.

You will need to “hill” the crop two to three times during its growth. Hilling means piling up soil or growing media around the stem to a height of 4-6 inches. This helps keep the underground growth covered and protected. The first “hilling” occurs when the stem turns from white to pink (you may need to peak under the soil to see this). The second hilling happens a month later, and the third just a couple weeks after that. Each time the crop is hilled it should also be fertilized with a well-balanced fertilizer. Watering should be consistent—not too much, not too little. It may be a tropical plant, but be sure not to overwater.

Again, it’s best used fresh and will keep well for about two weeks in the fridge. It is perfectly fine to store the rest of your crop in the freezer. And as a frozen product, it’s way easier to grate into whatever dish you are making.