My relationship with turmeric did not start well. Our household was pretty anglo when I was a kid, so I had had almost no exposure to herbs or spices at all, but I was given a chemistry set one birthday and, believe it or not, there was a test tube full of turmeric in it. It can evidently be used as an acid/base indicator in solution or so I hear, but anyway to me it stunk. Thus it became a component of several poorly designed ‘stink bombs’ and that was about it for turmeric in my childhood, until I matured and found the amazing tastiness of Indian food!
Turmeric is a tropical plant so I wasn’t sure how it would cope with the variability of the western Sydney weather, but I had developed a technique which worked well for ginger, and being related, I figured it would be worthwhile trying out the same idea with turmeric. Like its cousin ginger, turmeric likes lots of water, but at the same time needs a well-drained fertile soil and heat. The question was, how could I provide that?
I found that the ‘earth box’, a self-watering container with a large water reservoir which I could make myself would do the trick. An article on how to build one can be downloaded here, and a YouTube video on constructing one can be found here.
The advantages of the earth box were many –
- The large water reservoir meant that the soil could be kept damp without the need for constant watering.
- With the water being supplied from below by capillary action there was no danger of the roots becoming waterlogged.
- Being a container, the growing medium could be designed to suit the turmeric’s’ requirements and,
- The container being black, it made excellent use of the sun’s rays to keep the plant warm, even warming the soil on a sunny day in winter! Also, being a black container means they warm up and get going quicker in the spring than if the plant were in the ground, which stays colder for longer.
When it came time to set things up I was able to get hold of some turmeric rhizomes from the local supermarket, although these days a friend of mine operates an organic shop and I would obtain organic turmeric rhizomes from her. This was springtime, about 8 years ago and I wanted to give it a go.
I made four earth boxes and then filled them with good quality potting mix, enriched by about 25% with our own compost. One was for the turmeric, the other three were for galangal, ginger and spring onions. I then planted some turmeric rhizome bits I had bought and broken apart so that each piece had at least one bud, about 2 – 2.5cm deep in the turmeric earth box, and then mulched it with some straw from the chook pen.
My experience has been that they tend to grow fairly slowly, taking several years to expand to the point where I was confident that I could harvest some and leave the rest to grow. It has been only just this year that the turmeric is getting to the point where the earth box was almost full of rhizomes.
The books say the plants can grow up to a metre tall, and ours would reach that easily. They contribute to giving the backyard a wonderful, tropical feel and the turmeric flower is a real treat, so as well as being edible the plant is attractive too.
Another thing is that, so far, our turmeric has not been bothered by any pests or diseases, and so long as the water reservoir of the container is kept topped up, it just does its own thing really. This makes it an easy crop to grow.
Unfortunately, being tropical, they are not really fans of the western Sydney winter, especially when we get frost. They don’t completely die back to the rhizome like ginger does but they do become pretty anaemic and scrappy looking during the worst of winter, but they do come back strongly when the warm weather returns.
Using the process I have described above, I would think you could grow turmeric almost anywhere in Australia, although the further south you go the longer it would take to get a harvest. Still, if you are not a curry fiend or have to feed a family of 20, and have access to a warm sunny spot, I think it would be possible to grow a family supply of turmeric without too much bother.
