A COMPLETE GUIDE ON HOW TO GROW TURMERIC IN YOUR GARDEN

turmeric is a spice that is easy to grow and provides excellent health benefits in today's episode we look at how to plant harvest and use fresh tumeric to prepare turmeric powder which is used as a spice so sit back and enjoy as we take you through this journey so let's look at what kind of soil is good for planting turmeric now I use the standard potting mix which is comprised of peat moss perlite or vermiculite and a lot of compost and it works very well for planting turmeric now you can also reuse your existing potting soil or potting mix and add some extra peat moss or coco coir to enrich your soil and this forms a very good mix for growing turmeric it retains enough water and at the same time it also provides excellent drainage and there are two ways to pronounce turmeric you can pronounce it as turmeric or turmeric now both these pronunciations are absolutely correct so don't worry about pronouncing it either as turmeric or turmeric and now let's look at some different planting techniques you can plant store-bought turmeric I usually try to buy organic turmeric or the ones that you get from the farmers market which are fresh and ready to be planted so all you need to do is pick out some nice-looking tubers and then just plant them in your pot just like that you can even plant turmeric directly in the soil in the ground or in the raised beds and generally the volume of your harvest would be a lot more when you're planting this in raised beds or in the ground compared to planting turmeric in containers you can also plant turmeric plants from two birds from an existing plant so let's say you harvested some turmeric plants and after your harvest you will be left with the root of the plant and you can just put the root inside the soil just like that and it will grow into a new plant so this is also an easy way to plant turmeric there is another way to plant turmeric which is to use the child plant from the mother plant now when your turmeric plant becomes larger it's going to send out some more plants around the base of the main plant and these can be planted as a separate plant now if you're planning to grow your turmeric in containers make sure you choose a large container here we have chosen a large container which has about seven to ten gallons of soil and we'll be planting about three plants in this container so as you can see here you need to space out your plants well and make sure that you plant your turmeric in either full Sun which is preferred or in partial Sun so make sure your turmeric plants get at least about six hours of sunlight a day and this will help the plant grow very well and for you to harvest great quality turmeric from your plants and now let's look at some ways to care for your turmeric plant now your turmeric plant doesn't really need any fertilizers or nutrients if you use good quality compost and a good quality potting mix your plant will grow very well make sure you water your plants very well at least in the beginning stages of the growth of the plant on hot sunny days you may want to check and water your plants once a day or at least once in two days when you have cloudy weather or cool weather you can water your plants about two times a week or three times a week depending on how dry your soil is now if you do want to use a fertilizer you can use an all-purpose fertilizer the turmeric plant will grow very well and very vigorously if you use a all-purpose fertilizer that will provide a lot of nutrients the basic nutrients to the plants but I have grown turmeric plants without any fertilizers and they've grown really well as you can see here, a well grown turmeric plant will have nice vibrant leaves just like you see here and it will grow very well during the warm season which is from March onwards till about September and as you can see here you can mulch your turmeric plants as well and now let's look at the harvest now you can have harvests that are very small like what you see here this was planted in a five-gallon container and as you can see here the harvest doesn't look very big but it's still a decent harvest now if you plant your turmeric plants in the raised beds like we did here you can see that the harvest is a lot better and we were able to harvest a lot of turmeric when we planted these plants in the raised bed or in the ground and this is how a typical harvest should look like you should have enough turmeric to use for whatever purpose you need your turmeric for and here we're going to be using our turmeric to prepare turmeric powder so once the turmeric is nicely washed you may want to just dry it a little bit to the extent where you can see that they have turned slightly brown light brown in color and once that is done you need to peel them now if you don't peel your turmeric before you create turmeric powder you're gonna have to turmeric powder that is not very yellow in color it's gonna be more like reddish brown but once you peel the turmeric you dry them in the Sun for about a few days it usually takes about five to seven days you can even use a dehydrator if you have one to dry them quickly but I just use the sun dried method and it works really well and here you can see after five days of drying in the Sun the turmeric has shriveled and dried out to a state where it can be converted into turmeric powder now you need a very powerful blender to make sure that you get fine turmeric powder we are using a Blendtec here this is probably one of our best investments as a food processor or a blender and it's amazing quality and it can pretty much make any kind of powder it's pretty amazing I'll provide a link to this product in the video description so that if you want to buy this product you can buy it from Amazon and here you can see that after it's being converted into a powdered state the turmeric powder looks very vibrant very yellow and if you had kept the peel on this would have looked more like a reddish yellow color or a reddish brown color but you can see here this fresh turmeric looks absolutely amazing and it smells absolutely amazing and it also tastes great so all we do is just scoop out the turmeric powder from the blender that we used and this turmeric powder can be stored for a long time you can use turmeric powder in all sorts of dishes you can even add them to your smoothies you can make turmeric lattes there are a lot of ways you can use turmeric powder for and home grown fresh turmeric powder is absolutely great tasting and I highly recommend that you try growing turmeric and converting it to your powder at home