Regrowing Ginger

I love to regrow veggies from scraps. The link you see there is to a post from last year in which I detailed my excitement over regrowing romaine lettuce from the end of the head I bought for Easter dinner.  In fact, if you haven't read that post before, please click on over.  I was going to rerun it this year in celebration of starting a new batch of "scrap" romaine, because I believe so strongly in the transformative power of growing food from scrap.

But this year, I'm trying a new experiment, and I think this one will be equally exciting:  I'm regrowing ginger root.

Now, ginger falls into that category of herbs and spices that we often use fairly little of, except I've started making Clove-Ginger Ale almost weekly.  Even if I reduce the amount of herbs and spices in the blend and just let it steep a little longer, it still gets fairly pricey.

However, I've just learned that one can regrow ginger root.  That ugly thing you see in the photo is a ginger root, or rhizome, to be exact.  The little green onion-like protrusions are where it wants to regrow.  My understanding is that one just puts this in a pot of dirt and in a couple of months or so has a new root to dig up, replant part of, and use the remainder in cooking.

I'll do a full analysis when I have tangible results.  Right now, I have two ginger root pieces starting up in the sunroom.  I can't wait to see if this little project will save me a couple of bucks and let me have organically-grown ginger at my fingertips!