Hoosier Ginger

Somebody mentioned ginger in the ‘Impossible’ Project thread.

This has been on my radar for the past few months as well. We’re very fond of ginger in this house and I would love to be able to harvest it from our garden. I also think this is a crop that would grow very easily in our conditions and be good for the soil. Additionally think it would make a fantastic companion to banana here, as @UnicornEmily gave me some seed and I’d like to do a branch of the cold hardy banana project. I’d love to be able to grow and harvest ginger no-till as well, so that’s an either/or - - either a good companion crop to banana or grown and harvested no-till.

Somebody mentioned the idea that modern ginger can’t produce seed. I don’t know if that’s right or not but I’d certainly believe it isn’t very seedy.

The gingers I’m thinking of starting with however have not undergone the genetic damage of hundreds if not thousands of generations of clonal propagation. I’ve focused on dwarf gingers that can’t get taller than three or four feet and that don’t have a problematic record of invasiveness that I was able to find. This excluded kahili and I think crepe (not sure if cross able anyway) and possibly torch and others.

They are:
Hedychium gracile Salmon Ginger Lily
Hedychium ellipticum Rock Butterfly Lily
Hedychium spicatum Spiked Ginger Lily

They have all seen medicinal if not culinary use in their native ranges. As they are rhizomatous plants very possibly perennial in our climate (with or without a little work) and I suspect they will grow well, I worry about them escaping cultivation and its consequences.

I am looking to make a culinary ginger well suited to growing in weedy clay.

It would be ideal if other parts (at least the flowers) or even all parts of the plant were edible.

It would be best if it could be grown under mulch or straw and harvested at the end of the season, after producing seed, and still maintain good culinary characteristics. I don’t know much about how reproducing affects ginger’s texture and flavor, but as a perennial I would hope not adversely.

It should behave like a culinary ginger! I think perhaps one of these gingers I could only find ethnobotanical uses as medicine in the time I devoted to researching it. You should be able to use it as a medicine (we do use culinary ginger this way) and it’s important to bear in mind that it will probably always behave like one, but it is primarily intended as a culinary spice.

It is essential that the plant not escape cultivation or, if it does, that it not cause problems for the surrounding ecosystem. A non-exhaustive list of important things to keep track of seems like:

How well does it grow
How fast does it grow
Are critters attracted to the seeds
How easily are seeds accessed and dispersed

If the answers are well, extremely fast, yes, and very easily, for example, I would need to take extreme care to ensure that viable seeds are never accessible to wildlife. Emphasis on extreme. I’m not sure I would enjoy growing them under that kind of vigilance and high stakes, and they might not be appropriate to grow outside of a greenhouse here.

I’m taking a little bit of a gamble in growing food crops we’ve never eaten - - it’s certainly not a best practice. I don’t consider using varieties with deep history of ethnobotanical usage particularly risky however. But if they end up being inedible or borderline inedible, they can be unconventional cover crops.

Now if my seeds would just get here :thinking:

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I’m glad you’re thinking through the potential for invasiveness carefully, and planning to make sure it doesn’t happen! It’s a really important ecological consideration, especially for plant breeders who are looking to adapt a plant to a new ecosystem.

I’m trying to be careful about that, as well. I’m not at all concerned about bananas being invasive here, because even if they escape into the wild, they’d be unlikely to grow anywhere except near rivers, and even if they did that, they’d be competing with humongous, drought tolerant trees with deep roots. I think I can get bananas to survive here, maybe even thrive; I think it’s unlikely they’ll ever go feral, and even if they did, I don’t think they would be a problem. Just a little extra interesting diversity that stays low-key. There are places in the tropics where Musa velutina, the pink banana, is an invasive species, however.

What I’m being very careful with is trying to avoid extremely drought tolerant plants (like autumn olive) that are known for being highly invasive and aren’t currently in my ecosystem.

Yep, context is everything. My understanding is gingers tend to grow well in moist rich soil and humid conditions. We’ve got that, both here and all over the county, along with the possibility for two out of three of the varieties I’m planning on growing to overwinter out of the box.

I don’t think that clay is conventionally understood to be ideal for them, but I also think a lot of conventional growing rhetoric is unjustifiably biased against clay soils. I’m sure this confuses a lot of people into taking costly measures to amend their conditions that could be more easily undertaken organically over time (or not at all).

I am being cautious and taking “what if I succeed?” as just as important a question as “what if I fail?”.

Very wise. We should all learn a lesson from the many painful examples of deliberately introduced plants becoming highly invasive and destroying ecosystems.

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