Harvesting ginger and turmeric

Last year we planted some ginger from the veggie shop in two large pots as we thought they had more chance of growing where I watered regularly than 'down the back' where it would be forgotten. Seeing as it is the time of the year to dig it up I did just that this week.

Firstly though I dug up the little patch of turmeric and, as it turned out, we have two types growing...a yellow one and an orange one. I didn't know we had an orange one but when the CEO saw I had dug up the other lot he remembered that he had planted some last year 'somewhere' ;-) Eventually he found it but there wasn't much which isn't surprising considering it wouldn't have been watered very much. So I washed it all before taking the skin off ....

...and slicing it before processing it to go into the freezer.

Today I took it out of the freezer and was a bit disappointed I hadn't read the instructions for how to freeze ginger beforehand otherwise I would have frozen the turmeric the same way which you can read about below. Instead I thawed it for a little while so I could cut it and then ....

....cut it up into cubes which can be added to meals, tea etc. It will be handy to have on hand when making Golden Milk this winter. I know I should use turmeric a lot more than I do as it has so many health benefits and if you are interested you can read several articles on this I Quit Sugar page.

With the turmeric out of the way it was time to harvest the ginger. Underneath all the green of the Herb Robert plants that are growing absolutely everywhere at the moment there is a pot of ginger. As I mentioned earlier we had ginger planted in two pots this year. 

I was very pleased with how much had grown and after it was washed and the bits and pieces cut off we ended up with 1.3kg! Not bad for two pots. I had done some reading on a few blogs beforehand to see which method was best for freezing the ginger and it was mentioned several times to use a spoon for skinning which I did and it worked really well. One blogger said you don't need to take the skin off if it is organically grown ginger and just to clean it up and dry it first.

I had read a couple of blogs with tips on how to prepare the ginger for freezing including Meatified where the ginger is grated and then blended with coconut oil and put on a parchment lined baking tray and flash frozen although I am not sure what flash freezing is.

I followed the advice on Omnivore's Cookbook and cleaned up the ginger and put it in the food processor.

Then put some in a ziplock bag and pressed it down to form a thin sheet which makes it easy to snap a piece off when wanting to use some for cooking. The bags are then put in the freezer on a flat surface.

So now the turmeric and ginger are out of the way and there is just the Red Galangal to harvest although I just read in that link that it can be harvested most of the year rather than harvesting the whole crop. The leaves are still green so I will see if they die off like the ginger and turmeric. It is growing in a pot but I did plant some in the ground but it was covered by dahlias when they were flowering so it didn't do very well.

I will have to find a patch of ground where there are no dahlias growing which will be difficult :-) The CEO is a fan of dahlias and if you have been reading here for a while you would have seen them in several posts. They are very pretty I must admit but you can't eat them like turmeric, ginger and galangal. LOL!

If you grow those plants how do you preserve your harvest?