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Here it is it's October 15th and we're planting ginseng and you might say, why are
you planting ginseng in the fall, why not plant it in the spring
like most things are planted? Well, the problem is ginseng can't really be
planted in the spring...
if you live in the north. The reason for that is ginseng seed which has gone
through an 18-month
stratification period... once that seed cracks - once that embryo's fully mature,
it requires one more cold treatment and then the seed will germinate and you
cannot hold it. You cannot store the
seed. So if you were to hold on to that seed... Let's say it's October 15th... if I would say I'm
gonna plant the seed in April
so I'll store it in my refrigerator... sometime in February or March
that seed is actually going to start to sprout anyway
and once it's sprouted, it cannot be planted. So we really have no choice but
to plant the ginseng seed
in the fall proceeding the spring that's going to germinate.
If you harvest the berries and plant them immediately on site
as you should do well though seed won't come up the following spring but they'll
come up the year after that.
So it's a little bit complicated, but generally in the North, you have to
plant ginseng seed
usually sometime between August 15th and October 15th or
in this case probably November 15th although that's getting a little bit late.
Any type of fall planting is fine until the ground freezes. After that the seeds
just tend to
freeze-out. What sometimes happens is
if you get your seed and you immediately refrigerate it, you could sometimes put
that seed back into dormancy and won't grow
until the following year. But you can't hold ginseng seed over which is a real
problem in terms of procuring the seed.
It's like, I can buy tomato seed that's five years old and it's still gonna grow.
You can't buy five-year-old ginseng seed...it's not gonna grow. It's
dead by that point. Preparing a ginseng site in the forest can be quite a
challenge.
Depending on the site that you're working
most wood-land sites, particularly up here in upstate New York have lots and lots of
rocks and you obviously can't go in and pick every single rock that's in the
forest
so you have to kind of work around the outcroppings of rocks.
You also want to remove vegetation that's going to compete with ginseng which
would include a lot of the understory shrubs.
Even if they don't compete with them physically for nutrients they're
providing in some cases too much shade
So you try to get a rough idea of removing enough small trees and brush
so that you allow enough sunlight in for the ginseng to grow well
but not too much sun to get in so that the ginseng burns up it doesn't grow
properly.
Typically in the fall of the year the ideal time to plant ginseng would be
right before most to the leaves fall of the maple trees, because you do need to
mulch the ginseng with the fallen leaves.
So typically in a wild simulated situation, what we'll do is we'll
rake back
the leaves - generally rake them up hill...it's easier to get them back on the beds after that...
as far an area as we can develop. If it's twenty-five-foot-long
that's great. If we can do a four-foot wide by a twenty-five-foot long strip,
rake the leaves above that and then broadcast the seeds.
We're trying to plant about five seeds per square foot with the hope that
three or four years later through natural attrition we'll end up with one
plant per square foot - that way the foliage isn't touching and we don't have to
worry so much about diseases.
So let's say a four-foot by twenty-five-foot area which would be a hundred
square feet
we will plant about an ounce of seed in that - about
500-seeds in an ounce. So again, it works out to about five seeds per square foot.
The seed is broadcast on the surface of the soil,
but as I said the leaves are raked off and typically we'll go in with a tool to
scratch up the soil
because you do want to ensure that there's contact between the seed and the
soil.
So after we broadcast the seed - try to uniformly broadcast it by hand...
we'll then walk on those beds to make sure that the seeds are pressed into the
soil.
You don't want to plant the seed... say an inch deep - they won't grow at all
so you really want the seeds to be just lightly covered with soil
maybe a half an inch of soil on top of them and then it's a matter of raking the
leaves
back on top, hoping it rains or hoping that more leaves will fall to cover them
and provide the
the winter mulch. I don't think you could have too mulch -
natural mulch on ginseng. I've seen ginseng seedlings push up through six
or seven inches of leaf -
leaf tissue but the type of leaves is also important.
Maple leaves tend to break down and so four, five, six inches of maple leaves is
not a problem.
Oak leaves tend to pack and compact so ginseng seeds won't push up through an
inch or two of
oak leaves will basically be smothered but they will come up through
five or six inches a sugar maple leaf so the over-story trees are very
important in terms of
site preparation too. That's another reason why we tend to avoid
oak sites because of the tannic acid that's in the oak leaves.
Sugar maple leaves have calcium and that's a good thing. Oak leaves have tannic
acid in them... they pack down, they compact and that's a bad thing.