Potted Ginger Plant Yields an Unexpected Surprise

Last fall I wrote an article detailing my first attempts at growing baby ginger in the home garden. It was a big surprise to see how well the crop did in spite of the fact that I didn’t faithfully follow all of the cultural instructions as outlined by East Branch Ginger.

Well I was in for another surprise from a few potted ginger plants that were raised outdoors in containers during the summer and moved indoors for the winter. They seemed to do fine for a while and then suddenly went into a rapid decline. I’ll admit that I don’t do well with house plants and seldom offer them the amount of attention that they require.

Learned Something New about Potted Ginger’s Life Cycle

So I wasn’t shocked that the potted ginger plants didn’t make it out alive through the winter months indoors. What did surprise me was when I walked past the containers last week and noticed something strange… yep, there was new growth and spiky shoots coming up to proclaim that the plants hadn’t died after all… they merely went dormant.

That was the last thing that I would have expected, especially considering that the soil was all dry, cracked, and crusted over because the containers hadn’t received a drop of water for months, and ginger plants had to be unhappy with the humidity and light levels within the house.

I’ve witnessed similar miracles, like a Bay tree that recovered after all the leaves dried and went completely brown, but revived months later when it was moved outside to the patio. But the rebirth of the potted ginger was an even bigger surprise that I would have never expected to happen.

Adding to All the Great Reasons that I Love Ginger

I can chalk up another one to the list of things that I love about growing ginger: it’s easy to grow, extremely productive, tasty, nutritious, and it’s smart enough to shut down and then recover when conditions warrant! I’ll have to check with Susan over at East Branch Ginger to see if this is normal behavior or just a lucky occurrence in my case.

The first thing that I did to welcome the plants back was to give them a good soaking of water. Next up, I’m preparing a special plant cocktail of THRIVE and Poo Peas to give a boost and help them along. Later I’ll have to decide whether to keep these plants inside; where they’ll likely be subjected to more abuse, or to move them outdoors once the weather warms up.

I’m sure their odds will be better and they will be happier if they make the move outside, but either way I’ll keep you posted on how these miraculous ginger plants continue to perform!