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 