Tips for growing ginger & turmeric (in cold climates)

Hey Permies!

I recently learned it's possible to grow ginger & turmeric in 'colder' climates (providing you have a hoop house).

I decided to give it a try this year and seem to have had some success. It's getting close to harvest time for me.
Wondering if anyone has any tips for harvesting (ie: do I need to cure it?)

Thanks in advance for any & all replies.

Cheers!
-Pete

Your plants look great! I haven't been through it, but I saw that Fruition Seeds has a free online course on growing ginger and tumeric in cooler climates. It includes a topic of harvesting and storing and might be useful: https://www.fruitionseeds.com/learn/courses/grow-your-own-ginger-masterclass/

Mine took a long time to sprout and are still fairly small so my intent is to keep them in pots and attempt to overwinter them inside. If any are still looking good in the spring, they will go in the ground.

Just writing a follow-up post on my harvest. I was able to keep them in the hoop house until late October before we had some hard freezes. Things went pretty well and I ended up with around 4 pounds each of ginger and turmeric. I started with 1/2lb each, so I ended up with something like an 8:1 yield.

I used them to make some fire cider and froze the rest. I also found recipe for a delicious ginger chicken stir-fry, which is one of my favorites now:

     https://www.marthastewart.com/339666/chicken-with-ginger
 
Here's some pics showing the turmeric roots from just one of the plants (the ginger roots looked similar). The darker rhizome was the 'mother' of the cluster. I ended up with maybe 4-5 plants out of the 1/2 lb starter.  

Although growing them wasn't terribly difficult, cleaning and trimming the roots turned out to be much more labor-intensive than I anticipated. I ended up having to break them up into tiny pieces and go over them with a toothbrush to get all the dirt out from the nooks and crannies. Not sure if I will bother doing the turmeric again, but all in all it was a fun learning experience.  

cheers!

WOW!
You definitely got me thinking. My wife loves ginger and cooks with it a lot as well as making drinks. I hate buying it imported from China but that's about all we can find around here.

Does the turmeric need cleaning right when it's picked? Most roots I leave the dirt on and they seem to keep better. Maybe try just cleaning the piece you need right then not the whole bunch?