Turmeric Harvesting And Winter Care

Sherri:

I’m Sherri with HomeShow Garden Pros, and I’m joined today with Shelby from Nature’s Way Resources and Nursery, and we are going to talk about harvesting turmeric and winterizing. So turmeric is something that everybody can be growing, right?

Shelby:

Yeah, absolutely. You can grow it right here. It’s super easy to grow. This is the turmeric that we took through the summer, and now it has its winter look. So we’re going to be-

Sherri:

So this is kind of like late summer look?

Shelby:

Yes, late summer look.

Sherri:

Now where do we grow turmeric?

Shelby:

You can grow it in the ground. You can obviously grow it in pots. I highly recommend, if you grow it in the ground, well draining soil so that the rhizomes don’t rot.

Sherri:

Okay. And shade or sun?

Shelby:

Shade.

Sherri:

Okay.

Shelby:

Yeah.

Sherri:

So more shade. So at the end of summer, it kind of gets this look. Then we kind of go to this look.

Shelby:

Yes.

Sherri:

And so this is kind of indicating, “I’m at the end of my growth and I’m ready to go to sleep.

Shelby:

We’re stored up in our rhizomes. Definitely. So this is the perfect time to harvest. So we’re actually going to be harvesting this one, and we’re going to break it open and look at what those rhizomes look like inside of it.

Sherri:

Okay. Let’s just say we weren’t harvesting this one. Show us how you would winterize it before we dump the pot out.

Shelby:

So before we dump it, we would go ahead and just cut these off, and we would take this mulch over here and-

Sherri:

So this is Nature’s Way beautiful…

Shelby:

Native-

Sherri:

… Native Mulch.

Shelby:

Yes.

Sherri:

And we would just kind of cover it up, tuck it in.

Shelby:

Mm-hmm. Yep. So in the springtime, you could pull the mulch back a little bit. But really what you’re going to want to do is just let these little guys, these little leaflets, come up through the mulch.

Sherri:

Just naturally. Okay.

Shelby:

Mm-hmm.

Sherri:

But for the fun of this video, we’re going to show you how to harvest this. So Shelby, dig in. Let’s do this.

Shelby:

All right. Here we go.

Sherri:

This is the fun part because you actually get to see what’s happening under the ground. And with the medicinal qualities of turmeric, everybody should have it in your garden, in your medicinal garden. A lot of my plants, I kind of like to learn the medicinal effects. So turmeric is great for immune boosting because, without turmeric, you were telling me…

Shelby:

Yeah. So your body has a difficult time uptaking zinc without the addition of turmeric, so it’s a great thing to add to your daily regimen. You can take this and you can dehydrate it. You can grind it into a powder. You could make tea with it. You can use it fresh like you would use ginger. So there are multiple uses for it. And as you can see that this one three-gallon pot is just loaded with it. And each one of these has the capability of reproducing a new plant. So you can see right here, we’ve got a root on that one right next to the little bulbules right off of the rhizome. And so you could harvest the whole plant and then plant this one back in the ground…

Sherri:

For next year.

Shelby:

… for next year. Yeah.

Sherri:

Okay.

Shelby:

And it…

Sherri:

Just keeps it going.

Shelby:

… multiplies. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Sherri:

That’s awesome. So use what you need, replant the rest so you can harvest next year. So for more great tips like this, join us at HomeShow Garden Pros.