It is interesting the things you find out!
Quite some time ago a friend of mine gave me some cardamom plant (Elettaria cardamomum) which I planted near our back steps in a spot which is somewhat shaded by our vigorous bananas in the banana circle. It has continued to grow, albeit slowly, but there has not been any evidence of flowering so far, much to my disappointment because I wanted to produce our own cardamom pods. Costa gets his to flower at his place, which is much closer to the sea, but still in Sydney. Was my problem due to lack of direct sunlight? A good question!
With the recent refurbishing of our black self-watering containers, I decided to transplant some of the cardamom plant from its sheltered space near the bananas into the same area where we grow other members of the Zingiberaceae family (notably ginger, turmeric and galangal). The area is in full sun and with the black self-watering containers they get warmth all year round and also plenty of water, such that they are very prolific. It seemed to me that transplanting some cardamom there would make sense!
However, this is where things got interesting! I had not really done much with the cardamom since planting it there all those years ago, so I needed to do some research to find out the best way to transplant it. It was during those researches (thanks Jerry Colby Williams!) that I found out that the plant I have could actually be False Cardamom (Alpinia nutans) rather than True Cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum).
It seems that while the leaves of both plants can be used to flavour foods during cooking, the seed pods of the false cardamom taste like crap, while the seed pods of true cardamom taste like……… cardamom! (bet you didn’t see that coming!).
(Note: for using cardamom leaves in cooking, James Wong in his book “Homegrown Revolution” on page 159 says that cardamom leaves can be added to coffee or tea, put whole in rice dishes such as biryanis or finely chopped in stir fries and Asian style salads)
From what I read, the only way to tell the difference between the two was the flowers, with true cardamom having white flowers and a pink throat while false cardamom has white flowers with a yellow throat. As previously mentioned, my cardamom plant has not yet flowered so I have no idea which one I actually have. However, another clue is that the false cardamom is more cold tolerant and drought tolerant than the true cardamom and we do get cold and dry out here in western Sydney. But, the area where it was growing is quite sheltered and may be well watered due to the water from the banana circle. So, I really have no idea!
To resolve things I teased out some rhizomes with their associated shoots from the main plant, pulled them apart and planted them in the newly refurbished fourth self-watering container and mulched them with sugar cane mulch. There was obviously some serious root disturbance for the rhizomes I transplanted so on some I trimmed the leaves back by about 60% to reduce transpiration while the roots regrew. Others I left uncut to see if it made a difference.
Having accomplished this I now have to wait and see if my ministrations and relocation with result in the production of flowers, which will finally answer the question: True or false!
The adventure continues!
Update
After some of the cardamom was transplanted into the self watering container, a couple of weeks of cold weather started to make the cardamom look a little unhappy, and a further two weeks of continuing cold weather after that has resulted in some very sad cardamom shoots. Hopefully they will come back from the rhizomes when the weather warms up. However, the original cardamom plants over near the steps and under cover of the banana plants and awning have not changed! Maybe this is the real deal after all!
Two weeks on
Four weeks on
