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AMERICAN
GINSENG CULTIVATION
WILD-SIMULATED/VIRTUALLY WILD Ginseng loves to grow in moist deciduous woods with old trees. To grow it any other way is difficult because it really needs the tall shade provided by those old trees. they do grow fields of it in some places under shade cloth, but they spray lots of fungicides to keep it from getting sick. Almost all of what you'll buy in the health food store in capsules is grown this way. Ginseng likes the soil to have an acid pH of around 5.5 plus lots of Calcium, around 4000 lb/acre available. That's an unusual combination because usually soils with high calcium are high in pH also. But you can raise the calcium by adding gypsum without raising the pH if you need to. The ginseng likes lots of leaf mold from deciduous trees, as well. To get roots of marketable size growing it the way I grow it takes about 10 years. It's not legal to harvest and sell roots younger than 5 years unless you are growing it in beds and I'm not sure about the rules concerning that as I don't grow any that way. Now, I know 10 years sounds like a long time to wait on a crop to mature. But this year in Kingston, AR those little roots sold for $850/lb! It takes about 100 plants to make a pound. To make sure the plants have what they need as a colony, you need to have plantings of at least 100 plants and never harvest more than 25% of the colony. This way they can have enough of themselves to seed and reseed and continue growing indefinitely. If too many deer are browsing them down, or people are taking too many when it's time to harvest, eventually they'll die out and you'll only have occassional survivors in the woods to see. this might take several generations, but there are studies showing the optimal populations that they need. There are plants that grow in the same environment as them that you can look for to see if your woods have what it takes: trillium, jack-in-the pulpit, spicebush, pawpaw, solomon's seal, false solomon's seal, wild ginger, black and blue cohosh, doll's eyes, maidenhair ferns, and christmas ferns. Oh, and bloodroot and goldenseal too. The buyers who come to my neck of the woods won't even offer you a price on roots that were grown in tilled beds because the root looks different and the chinese like them to be wrinkled and dense. Anyway, there's a little info about growing ginseng. If you have any other questions, I'm happy to answer. And if you happen to live out this way, visit my website or blog for a schedule of herbwalks and workshops - we look at ginseng on all of them. |