Harvest: Turmeric

I first noticed my turmeric plants yellowing off for winter about a month ago, but it's been so wet and miserable here for some time, that I haven't had a chance before now to dig it up. I didn't want to cultivate the soil while it was so wet for fear of destroying the soil texture, but as soon as it would dry out a little, down came the rain again!

Finally, we've seen a couple of days of sun this week, so yesterday it was out into the garden with the digging fork.




Despite my fears that the rhizomes would be rotting in the ground, they were mostly OK, with only the odd rotten one which was great. I honestly can't remember how many rhizomes I planted last year, I just remember shoving them into the ground in the new "dog-leg" vegie bed when I had a spare 10 minutes LOL. I guess it was about a dozen? We then proceeded to have some (more!) seriously wet weather afterwards, when I lost of lot of my newly-planted root crops to root rot, so I was quite pleased to get maybe half of them growing over summer.



It was the work of maybe 5-10 minutes to dig the plants up, but then they were so full of sticky mud (and worms!) that it probably took another hour of rinsing, sorting and removing the roots before I could get a look at the final harvest:



Not too shabby for a home garden, if I do say so myself.



Final harvest total: 3.944 kg or 8.7 pounds.

Some will be eaten fresh in stir fries and curries (oh, how winter and Indian curries go together!), some saved for replanting in spring and the bulk will be sliced, dried in the dehydrator and powdered, as I did last year.

You can read more about growing turmeric here.