Medicinal and culinary herbs wrapped up in one

We enjoy the luxury of a garden in a really central urban area, we count our blessings daily.

Since it is such an amazing resource we try to get as much out of it as we can. Our main limiting factors are space and sun.

Some food production, recreation, play space for the kids, and all this on than 440 sq feet, 135m square. It’s a work in progress, we’re now working on converting our path into growing space, and making the path just enough to walk on (why should it be any more than that?!)

I recently made a new medicinal garden bed. I tried to function stack here and chose to plant turmeric and ginger rhizomes as a food crop (culinary herbs) and a medicinal.

In our home, we use these powerful rhizomes in many ways. We drink teas in the winter using them, I use turmeric powder as an anti-inflammatory in a natural remedy for mastitis and joint inflammation, turmeric powder is part of my favorite spice mix, I use fresh ginger in cooking and in cough syrups.

I had bought rhizomes of both these plants and left them on the window sill in my kitchen. I wet them lightly every day and they began to sprout from the eyes.

See those little bulges on the ginger root? That’s the ginger beginning to sprout. This step will make it easier for the ginger to establish in the ground.

The same can be seen with the turmeric.

It’s very cool to see the rhizome ‘wake up’.

I planned the space of the garden bed, I put rocks to mark its’ boundaries and attached a drip irrigation pipe to the mainline that will water the bed.

The soil in the new garden bed was very compacted, as it had been a path for 3 years. I loosened it with a pitchfork, without turning it, just loosen it.

Next, I mixed in compost and some chicken manure and lightly tilled it in the loose soil.

I found the holes in the drip irrigation pipe and placed the rhizomes in a shallow hole underneath.

We watered it thoroughly and mulched it with wood shavings with rabbit droppings do dry leaves.

I’ll let you know how it goes all along the way.

Do you grow your medicinals? Do you use ginger or turmeric? Share how in the comments below.