growing ginger in the pacific nw

Does anybody have experience growing ginger in or around cascadia?  The information I've found so far tells me to grow it in a container, but I wanna put it in the ground!  I have some ideas about how to make a warmer area for the ginger to grow, but would love to hear about other human's experiences.

I'm wondering about growing ginger too...

I know they grow it in greenhouses in Bellingham.

urtica wrote:
Does anybody have experience growing ginger in or around cascadia?  The information I've found so far tells me to grow it in a container, but I wanna put it in the ground!  I have some ideas about how to make a warmer area for the ginger to grow, but would love to hear about other human's experiences.

I understand it does grow wild here (Southwest Oregon Coast), try contact a nursery in your area that specializes in native plants.

Sorry but what zone are you in? I started ginger a year ago in the late spring and it came up and grew really well. I wish I would have had taken pictures. Before frost I cut down the dead greens and scattered them on top, then placed more straw on it. I then topped it off with big rocks, to try and insulate the roots. I will know if this was successful this spring, but as far as one growing season goes, it went really well, and it was yummy.

Im in zone 6.

Ive had good luck with Mioga ginger(Zingiber mioga).Mine have proven perennial down to 7 degrees farenhight(zone 6-7 west of the cascades) without mulch and have spread to form a large patch.They are invasive at the Bullocks.You dont eat the roots but the shoots and flowers.

Mt.goat wrote:
Ive had good luck with Mioga ginger(Zingiber mioga).Mine have proven perennial down to 7 degrees without mulch and have spread to form a large patch.They are invasive at the Bullocks.You dont eat the roots but the shoots and flowers.

LOVE myoga!  One could sell that for a good markup at a Japanese or Korean market. 

Ginger is a traditional crop in Japan...which is wet temperate, not so different from the PNW. 

Let it die back and heavily mulch to protect from cold.

"West of the Cascades" is in zone 8.  The following link supplies several growers here (as well as to zones 4-5!).

http://www.eastbranchginger.com/

not sure if this helps ...

https://youtu.be/ukFeQ7qbn8s

Growing ginger in container. The foliage look very beautiful and you get to harvest home grown ginger. Very easy plant to start and grow in containers.

[url=https://youtu.be/ukFeQ7qbn8s]Growing Ginger in containers [/url]

I am trying to grow ginger, and started it inside since it’s raining constantly right now, and I have tried outside before and the rotted on me.
Now I have a different problem. The tips of my ginger turns brown and dies. I have tried spraying them with water so they don’t dry out, and it helped a little, but they are still not looking good. Our humidity is between 40 and 50 right now, since it’s raining so much, so I am baffled by it.
I have turmeric growing next to it, and it’s also having trouble, of the same type.

HELP please!

I'm wondering if it is a light/heat issue. I think of ginger as being dormant in the winter, so maybe they are struggling despite being indoors. Can you give them supplementary light perhaps? This site seems to be a nice write up of the conditions ginger likes. It doesn't seem to be a humidity issue with you, but light or heat conditions may not be optimal.

Nancy Reading wrote:I'm wondering if it is a light/heat issue. I think of ginger as being dormant in the winter, so maybe they are struggling despite being indoors. Can you give them supplementary light perhaps? This site seems to be a nice write up of the conditions ginger likes. It doesn't seem to be a humidity issue with you, but light or heat conditions may not be optimal.

I should have written that I have a 3000w grow light in my nursery. I was lucky enough to find a grow light, that fits perfectly with the size of the room, but it might be heat. The temperature indoors drops to 65F at night indoors.
(I want a rocket heater, but hubby isn’t very good at building things, and neither am I. I have a small heater, but don’t use it at night.

The nursery is a double shower we never used, so after sitting there doing nothing for 5 years, we repurposed it as a nursery. I covered the walls and floor with reflective sheets, added the light, a hose connector and a large planter.
I am currently using the planter as a table for my seedlings, since I have transplanted everything I have in the planter. On the floor next to it, I have two self watering pots, with turmeric and the ginger. Both have brown leaves, but where I have almost eliminated the problem for the turmeric with the misting, it didn’t eliminate it for the ginger, it just slowed it down.
The plan is to move them out into the garden, once it heats up a little more. I am in zone 10b, so while we don’t get any hard frost, we do get it until the beginning of March. Right now, I am just hoping that I can keep them going until March and that moving them outside will solve the problem.
I mainly use the nursery to start seedlings, and propagate cuttings. It usually works fantastic for that, just not the ginger and turmeric. I have added a couple of photos of the nursery.
I think I will add a heating mat to the ginger, in case you are right, that it gets too cold at night.

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:[
The nursery is a double shower we never used, so after sitting there doing nothing for 5 years, we repurposed it as a nursery. I covered the walls and floor with reflective sheets, added the light, a hose connector and a large planter.

Ooh! Nice!

Hopefully the extra heat will do the trick. That's the trouble with indoor plants, nature is so much better at looking after them than we are. You realise how much easier it is to grow what wants to grow naturally than create the right environment for a particular plant. It's maybe worth it for something as useful as ginger and turmeric though!

Nancy Reading wrote:
Ooh! Nice!

Hopefully the extra heat will do the trick. That's the trouble with indoor plants, nature is so much better at looking after them than we are. You realise how much easier it is to grow what wants to grow naturally than create the right environment for a particular plant. It's maybe worth it for something as useful as ginger and turmeric though!

It is. I have tried growing it outside before, but it never got big enough before the temperatures went over 85F and then they die on me. That’s why I started them inside early. I am hoping that this time, they will be big enough to handle the sun, once it really hits after summer solstice. It’s the same with turmeric.
I use a lot of those two plants when cooking and making medicine, which is why I want to grow them. I go through 6 pounds of ginger a year, on average.

I've thought about trying to grow ginger, but the lack of a greenhouse and other priorities had put it well down the list until my son's girlfriend showed up with a ginger root she'd left on her counter and it started to grow. She's a lovely, sweet girl, and she hoped I could give the little ginger baby a chance...

So I found a roomy pot - nothing pretty as I've no idea how this is going to turn out!
I put some homemade biochar and some punky wood in the bottom, then I packed duck-shit-inoculated wood chips around the punky wood and up a couple of inches.


Then there was a pot full of dirt in the garden - the plant got chewed by a deer and then died, so I dumped the dirt on top to give it some new purpose in life. I planted the baby ginger in the center - I hope just half burying it is the right thing to do?


It looked awfully lonely! I had some "cut and come again" lettuce that was too crowded, so I dug up one corner of it, separated it gently, and put them around the edge. They won't live a long life so I have time to contemplate if there are other companion plants for ginger that I could consider adding. Would it like a few heat loving bush beans come July?


My fingers are crossed. It would have landed in the compost, and now it has a chance. I had nothing to loose by trying this. I'm assuming I need to dig it up this fall and if there's any ginger root for the winter, that will be great. If I just get a bit of experience with ginger, that's not a loss either.

Alas, we had a very cold, wet, dark spring, and the ginger experiment above rotted before it got any chance.

However, in the summer of 2025, a friend of my son's showed up with a baby ginger plant that his mother had raised. He told me it needed as much sun and as much heat as we could give it. I got it transplanted into a pot that could live indoors on my window ledge. It kept putting out leaves and shoots, but none of its leaves seemed to live very long. No idea what the problem with that was.

Winter approached and I knew our house would be too cold at night from what I'd read, so I sent it home with my DiL to her basement apartment that was kept at a continuous temperature of about 20C (~68F). Alas, not sure what she did wrong, but she recently returned the pot and plant and it had pretty much died back completely.

I found this on the internet: "The full sun ginger grew last year, died back in winter and then regrew."* I had already been wondering if I was seeing winter die-back, and figured I'd let it go a while and see if the roots had enough strength to sprout. I am well aware of how many baby seedlings don't survive their first winter - fingers crossed!

The same fellow wrote: "I would say ginger needs plenty of room for the roots."* For the size of the seedling, the pot I used was a good size. It was certainly as good as I could manage. I have a friend who supposedly has a "ginger plant" living indoors, mostly shaded, "tree pot" sized container and she's kept it alive for a good 10 years, but I'm not sure it's actually an edible ginger, and she's never explored the roots.

There is no way at this time that I could give the plant a spot in the ground where it would be warm enough (assuming it isn't dead... big assumption!)  I do feel I've read enough to say that several hours of full morning sun would be a happy thing, but some afternoon shade would be fine. I will try to remember to post an update.

*https://steemit.com/gardening/@jed78/the-ginger-experiment-full-sun-or-full-shade-i-still-don-t-know

Last fall, I finally had my first big harvest of ginger. I started them indoors in February, in my nursery, so they would get plenty of sun and heat. Then I transplanted them outside in May, in a raised bed with plenty of room, mulch and drip irrigation. I harvested them all just before thanksgiving and we got a nice big harvest. I think I could have left them another month, but I was afraid we would get too low temperatures for them to handle.
The picture shows them all curing on a tray. I had 5 plants, and got 8 pounds, if I remember correctly. Some of the ginger was minced and frozen, and some was juiced and frozen. I used mini ice cube trays.
I am going to start a new batch next month.
What I have learned, is that they need 8 to 10 months of grow time to produce. They rot if they get too much water, so the soil has to be well drained or use drip irrigation. Straw mulch has helped a lot it’s keeping the soil temperature steady instead of fluctuating.
That said, we are in grow zone 10b in Southern California, southeast of San Diego, so it’s hotter here than where you are. To grow them, I think you will need a heating mat and a grow light, so you can extend the growing season.
Also, I change the growing setup I showed further up. I now use shelving units with light underneath the shelves.
It’s the same one I use to start my seeds.

I grow it in my greenhouse in Alabama in permanent raised beds. It’s incredibly easy and resilient.  I just buy a couple pounds of organic roots every time I replant and cut them into pieces that have at least one sprout on them. I also grow a purple variety that is more cold resistant that supposed to be highly medicinal though I couldn’t tell you right now,  what it’s supposed to be so good for. I make gallons of fire cider every year and both varieties as well as turmeric and horseradish are the centerpieces.

I did grow turmeric from grocery store live roots.  I was at 5000 feet elevation.  I had a huge nursery pot, probably 25 gallon.  In the summer I kept it outside, with a roof overhead, but no walls.  It did get some direct sun, but mostly it was flooded with bright reflected light.

In the winter I let it go dormant, then brought it in to the basement where it would not freeze.

When I moved to an old log cabin at 8000 feet, I gave it to some friends who owned a nursery.  It had a place in a heated greenhouse in the winter, in the summer it had full sunlight, and it even bloomed.  It bloomed for 2 summers before they needed winter space in the greenhouse.  They probably ate all the roots.

We got very lucky I guess.  I had no knowledge about the soil needs when I planted it.  It grew in that big pot for about 5 years.  We had no diseases nor pest problems.

Cascadia is in zone 8b? correct? so you are in a better position to grow ginger there than I am in Central Wisconsin zone 4b, but I can grow it in containers. Ginger and turmeric are kissing cousins: both are tropical plants, so yes, you have to make sure they get a tropical climate as much as possible.
Because it takes forever to get them going (like 8-10 months), I start mine indoors with a heating mat, which means that the pot (trays, really) have to be shallow.
Once they are started, they won't be so touchy, but you still have to prevent them from freezing. They can be moved outside when the temperature is consistently above 68F.
I have a major problem with our stores here as they systematically clip the tender buds so they won't sprout on their shelves, I assume, (but frankly, there's no risk of that happening!). And then, to make sure, They keep the rhizomes in the center of the store, so with artificial light only. Those poor things dry out within a couple of weeks and can't be salvaged even to eat!
Once you taste the tender, just picked, plump rhizome out of the soil, nothing else will do.
But first, we have to teach our storekeepers to not mutilate them or keep them chilled!
I wish I could grow them in the ground but it just isn't possible here.
Good luck to you!

It does grow wild in the western Cascades. I have found it along trails. But I am told our wild ginger is different from that found in the store

Dave Bartholomew wrote:It does grow wild in the western Cascades. I have found it along trails. But I am told our wild ginger is different from that found in the store

Yes, the wild plant called Ginger in the Pacific Northwest is a totally different plant and I believe it's considered inedible.

Dave Bartholomew wrote:It does grow wild in the western Cascades. I have found it along trails. But I am told our wild ginger is different from that found in the store

Yep.  I saw Jay's answer and he's correct. I didn't know there were different kinds and I'm trying to grow some ginger indoors (I'm in Wisconsin, so the tropical kind needs a lot of help here!),
So I looked it up:
Types of Wild Ginger (Asarum Species)
Canadian Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense): A native North American deciduous groundcover with fuzzy, heart-shaped leaves.
Western Wild Ginger (Asarum caudatum): Native to the West Coast, this species has darker green, more evergreen foliage.
European Wild Ginger (Asarum europaeum): Known for its shiny, glossy, heart-shaped leaves.
Asarum Species: There are over 100 species in the Asarum genus, many used in woodland gardens for their foliage, such as Asarum caudatum (British Columbia to California).
Important Differences & Considerations
Not True Ginger: Asarum wild ginger is in the pipevine family (Aristolochiaceae), not the Zingiberaceae family of culinary ginger.
Toxicity: While historically used in small amounts for tea, many Asarum species contain aristolochic acid, a compound that can be damaging to the kidneys and is considered a carcinogen, meaning consumption is generally not recommended.
Culinary Ginger Varieties: Beyond the standard ginger in the grocery store, there are related edible types like turmeric, galangal (Thai ginger), and red ginger.
Common Culinary/Ornamental Gingers (Zingiberaceae family)
Ginger (Zingiber officinale): Standard kitchen ginger.
Galangal (Alpinia galanga): Used in Thai cooking, similar to ginger but more citrusy.
Turmeric (Curcuma longa): A bright yellow root often used in curries.
Shampoo Ginger (Zingiber zerumbet): Known for its red, cone-shaped, aromatic flower head.
Shell Ginger (Alpinia zerumbet): Ornamental plant with striped leaves and white flowers.
Who knew there were so many different kinds!