Growing baby ginger: Farmers find it’s worth the fuss

If you walk past the tidy rows of raspberries inside the hoop house at Casselmonte Farm, you’ll dead-end at a waist-high forest of green stalks, whose explosion of leaves conceals not a single fruit or vegetable. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that Bill and India Cox were growing Florida swamp grass on their property in Powhatan County, Va.

As it turns out, the couple is raising a crop with virtually the same recognition factor as swamp grass: baby ginger. These young rhizomes, buried in the soil just under that jungle of foliage, will not mature long enough to develop the familiar beige skin of their older siblings. Nor will they develop any of those stringy fibers that can make grating mature ginger feel as if you’re trying to shred a burlap bag. Immature ginger is off-white, rather soft and pliant, with rosy, undeveloped leaves called bud scales. Baby ginger tickles your palate instead of assaulting it.

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You sort of feel as though you want to pinch baby ginger’s cheeks.

The infant analogy is apt. The growing season for immature ginger, roughly from March to October, is almost as long as the gestation period for a human newborn, and baby ginger might be just as difficult to raise. The plants require not only a long growing period (which, on a farm, can monopolize valuable real estate) but also ample amounts of water and just the right soil temperature. “They’re not an easy crop,” says Heinz Thomet, owner of Next Step Produce, an organic farm in Charles County, which was an early adopter of “fresh” ginger (as it’s often called) about five years ago.

Bill, 64, and India Cox, 59, a pair of former office professionals from Richmond and Annandale, respectively, are just discovering the unique challenges of growing a tropical plant in the Mid-Atlantic as they move forward with their second careers as small-scale farmers. The couple planted baby ginger for the first time this season to supplement their more common crops, including tomatoes, greens and carrots, and they’ve had to confront the limitations of central Virginia as a hub for ginger production.

The weather, of course, is the primary obstacle. Ginger is fussy; it prefers a warm environment — but not too warm. The plant generally requires soil between 50 and 90 degrees, which essentially means that the Mid-Atlantic can be a miserable place to grow the crop. The late winter and early spring months are too cold, and the summers too hot.

To deal with the climactic vagaries, the Coxes had to sprout their ginger seed — merely pieces of mature rhizomes — in a tented and heated area in their basement until temperatures in the hoop house were warm enough for replanting. In late April, the couple transferred the ginger to the hoop house, where it fared well until the heat of July turned some of the plants’ leaves brown. The farmers tried to comfort their stressed crops by keeping the space well ventilated and the plants well watered.

Like all beginners, the Coxes learned other tricks too late. They could have bought a screen that would have limited the sun’s ability to heat the hoop house like a toaster oven; they could have rotated the plants around the hoop house, giving each one equal time near the structure’s ventilated walls; they could have clumped the plants closer together, so that their own foliage would provide shade for the soil. Yes, they could have done any or all of those, but they didn’t have to. Instead, the weather finally cooled a little in August.