Harvest Home Grown Organic Ginger In A Pot

Sometime last year, I had placed a couple ginger rhizome in a large pot and decided to harvest today.  I believe it has been roughly about 10 months ago when I first placed some store bought ginger in the pot.  The pot was first kept under my porch and later moved it under a bougainvillea plant.

The Ginger in the pot

First I loosen the soil around the outer area of the rhizomes and than held all of the branches (if you call them that) and pulled out the ginger plant.

Pulling Ginger Plant

Close up of the ginger rhizome

There were a few rhizome that was small and decided to put them back in the pot....hopefully didn't stress the plant to much and these will give me another harvest.

Rhizome the be planted back

Planted back rhizome

 Proceeded to wash the rhizome in a pail and removed the small roots.

Cleaned Ginger

Next I dried the ginger under a shade for about 2 hours and placed them in the refrigerator to be used over the coming days.

Ginger to be stored

Roughly harvested about half a kilo of ginger.

Harvest Homegrown Natural Organic Turmeric and Making Turmeric Powder

Almost 2 years ago, had place a turmeric rhizome, about 2 inches long, into the ground to get turmeric leaves for making rendang.  Over time, the turmeric plant grew and the leaves have been used many times in making chicken rendang.  With the leaves, rendang tastes much better.

Here's a picture of the turmeric plant when it had a flower, this was a first time I had seen a turmeric flower in real life.

Turmeric Plant Flower

Turmeric Plant Flower

The other day, I was planting herbs into the ground, and decided to remove the turmeric plant and was pleasantly surprised to see the growth of the rhizome.  I mean, all I did was place them in the ground and didn't even look after them, just left them there for the leaves and could not believe how much it had grown under ground!

Harvested Turmeric

From 2 inches to this!!!

  

Was wondering how to store the turmeric and went online and read that the best way was to make it into turmeric powder.  Read a bit more on making turmeric powder and was told that needed to boil the rhizome first.

Checked with the the Family Whatsapp group and 2 of my aunts have made turmeric powder before and was told no need to boil the rhizome, just cut them into small pieces and sun dry them.  That is exactly what I did.  Here's the simple process:

1st, clean the rhizomes in a bowl of water.

Just by rubbing the rhizomes with my thumb and fingers they were clean with beautiful bright orange color.

Next, I removed the skin on half of the turmeric and the other half kept the skin on.  Again, look at the beautiful bright orange color. 

Turmeric without the skin

Next I cut them into small pieces and placed them on a old clean t-shirt to sun dry them.

Sun drying turmeric

We were very fortunately as we had 3 days of really strong sun with only evening showers, brought them inside the house before it rained.

A word of caution, everything turns into a beautiful orange, fingers, knife cutting board etc. If you mind the color on your hands, do wear a glove.  Not to worry, after a couple of days, the color goes away from the finger and a scrub of the board removes the color.