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Ginseng is a common name for about six species of plants
that have been a highly prized for their roots in general.
There's really two varieties of ginseng that are commercially grown
and those are American ginseng which is panax quinquefolius
and Asian ginseng which is panax ginseng and the word ginseng actually stands for
two
Chinese characters that together say man root because sometimes ginseng roots do
tend to resemble human figure.
Ginseng is just...refers to these the
these plants in general. There's generally two ways a growing ginseng in
a forest situation.
The first would be called woods cultivated. Woods cultivated
ginseng is defined by the fact that some sort of mechanical tillage
is utilized to prepare the planting site, but essentially woods cultivated ginseng
is grown in beds and those beds are prepared by some sort of mechanical
cultivation.
Typically it's going to require some sort of
spraying for diseases because the plants are going to be crowded
and you will end up with roots that will grow fairly large
fairly quickly but they will not really resemble
wild ginseng which of course is going to be the most highly prized ginseng.
Wild simulated ginseng is ginseng that is grown
without using any sort of mechanical implements to till the soil.
The only tools that are used are hand tools such as rakes and grub axes and
things like that...scratchies for the soil but basically no mechanical tillage
and typically that will be planted at a much much lower rate.
Twenty pounds per acre would be about appropriate planting rate for wild
simulated ginseng
and that's going to result in ideally about one plant per square foot, so
that's the population that you'd be shooting at
and quite often with wild simulated ginseng you do not need
to spray...you generally don't need to use any pesticides
and of course you certainly wouldn't want to use any fertilizers in wild simulated
ginseng because you want to develop a wild-looking root.
In woods cultivated ginseng, you might very well be adding a little bit
fertilizer, again, to try to get a big group is quick as possible.
The yields from woods cultivated ginseng are going to be much much higher than
wild simulated ginseng.
You might get 6...800 pounds or maybe even a thousand pounds or more
of dried route from an acre of woods cultivated ginseng,
whereas a really good yield of wild simulated ginseng for an acre would be
two or three hundred pounds of root. The difference lies in the price that you
receive for those roots.
Right now, while simulated ginseng is selling for
six to eight hundred dollars I should say per dry pounded New York
depending on how old it is... that would be for typically 8- to 12-year-old root.
Umm.. woods cultivated ginseng might bring about half that price.
Wild ginseng would probably sell, again, from New York
wild ginseng would sell for somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred to a thousand
dollars a pound so
wild-simulated will bring prices that are close to the price that are being
paid for wild
especially if it's grown on a good site and the roots are big and
healthy and vigorous and don't have any evidence of disease.