The Ginger Tree

I don’t welcome Fridays. In the restaurant industry it means getting ready to serve a lot of food. But this past Friday I was pleasantly distracted by an unexpected visitor from a farm called Eco Farms.

I was head down into a large tub of beets, peeling them with a dry cloth, when I looked up and saw a middle aged man in jeans, Timberland construction boots, a zip up maroon hoody, and a yellow piece of paper starring me in the face.

“Good morning chef.” He said
“Good morning” I chuckled (he clearly didn’t know I was NOT “the chef”)

He held out a paper order for me to sign, one copy for him and one for us. I signed it and then looked at what he had brought us: three pounds of arugula in a clear plastic bag labeled in nice penmanship, a pound of radishes about one inch tall and half inch wide, and lastly, a tall tree of ginger.

I picked it up from the root and saw the labeling. It was the first time I had seen fresh ginger. From the root, which we all recognize as “ginger” in stores, came a tall stalk of greenery, which then had six or eight pineapple like leaves shooting off of each side of the stalk (as you can see above).

As the farmer and I gazed at the beauty of the plant, he told me it was a biannual plant (meaning it takes 2 years to go from see to plant to seed again) and that he had picked it in the first year. By picking it in its first year, the ginger plant had not developed the brown skin like aesthetic on the root. In grocery stores when you buy ginger, you are buying a brownish root. The brown is the skin that develops later, on the plant.

Ginger, having been originally cultivated in China, is used in many cuisines and dishes across the world. Young ginger, like what we got at the restaurant, is juicy with a mild taste. “…They are often pickled in vinegar or sherry as a snack or just cooked as an ingredient in many dishes. They can also be stewed in boiling water to make ginger tea, to which honey is often added as a sweetener; sliced orange or lemon fruit may also be added. Mature ginger roots are fibrous and nearly dry. The juice from old ginger roots is extremely potent and is often used as a spice in Chinese cuisine to flavor dishes such as in seafood and mutton” (wikipedia website). In addition to culinary uses, ginger is also used to treat nausea and morning sickness.

With China producing the most amount of ginger in the world (25%), it was nice to see that some farmers around the mid atlantic region were taking the initative to grown some ginger of their own.