 Greetings friends. This is Survival Dog. Today, I'm going to harvest my ginger plants. Here we have my ginger growing in this pot here. And as you can see, it has been bitten by the freezes that we've had the last couple of days. Here we are in mid-November in Zone 6, Missouri Ozarks. And we've already had a couple of nights where temperatures dropped below freeze and only down to about 31, 30 area. And so it killed my ginger plants. Now these plants, the ginger is supposed to mature in about 10 months. And it's been approximately 10 months since I planted these plants. And so I think it's time to harvest them. Now, if you notice, I have chicken wire here. And if I didn't have chicken wire or something, the plastic bird wire will work. If I didn't have the protection here, then I wouldn't have any ginger. Because when I first planted these, first thing that happened the first day, the squirrels were in there digging up my ginger roots. And by now, and I see them, I look out the window and watch them try to get in here from time to time. And I have no doubt that they would have already dug all this up. So this has protected my ginger. It probably would have been easier just to go ahead and cut the ginger before I did this. But I wanted to try and see what happened if I did this. And of course, the ginger is the root that we're using. This is what I started with, with ginger root. This is simply the fresh ginger root you buy at the grocery store. Now, I bought this at Whole Foods Market. I was careful to buy organic ginger. And I just took the ginger that I bought at the grocery store and I cut little pieces. If you notice here, it's a little shoot coming out. So what I would do here is I would just cut this right across here and that's what I would plant. If you notice ginger, a little bit like potatoes and it has these areas similar to the eyes of a potato. So when I'm cutting it up, I try to cut small pieces that have something on it that looks like an eye. And that's what I started with and I planted those about 10 months ago. So let's take a look and see what we've got here. Of course, this is a root. I don't want to damage the root. So I want to be careful digging it up to bring up the root. Okay, here's what I have here. Alright, these are brand new sheets right here. These are small. I think what I'll do is I'll actually put these aside to plant back in the earth. Alright, here's my ginger root. It's kind of small, but much larger. I just had a very, very small piece that I had planted here so it has grown. It looks like it could do a little bit more growing. You need to plant ginger to give it enough time to have a full 10 months in the ground. Let me see if I can find a bigger piece here. Okay, now that's what I'm talking about there. Got some nice pieces of ginger here. Ginger root is a great culinary herb. It has many uses. One notable use is for nausea, stomach problems. Herbalists consider ginger a warm herb. It's a heating herb. It helps your digestive process. In Chinese herbal medicine, digestion is considered like a furnace where you're burning your food, so to speak, for energy. Warming herbs help the fire of digestion. People commonly use ginger root for things like nausea. You can just cut a small piece, about a little half inch piece off of ginger, and put it in a cup, pour boiling water over it. Let it steep for about 10 minutes and you have a nice ginger tea, which is very pleasant. It's good for digestion and it's also good for nausea. It's good for motion sickness, very commonly used for motion sickness. Ginger is also a preservative herb. You can take ginger and you can dry it, powder it, use it fresh, and use it when you're preserving meats. Say if you're making a jerky or you're drying meat to preserve it, smoking meat, a lot of herbs you can use to help preserve the meat. Ginger is a nice herb to add to your spices that you use to preserve your meat. Medicinal uses, culinary uses, and it's just plain delicious. It's easy to grow. You too can grow your own ginger. Buy the ginger root from the store, cut off pieces, plant them in the soil, protect them from the squirrels. Remember, it's going to take 10 months for the ginger plant to mature, so you have to give it time. This shows you what I planted macro here. You can see this piece right here is the ginger that I cut and planted in the soil. From here, we've got these right here, and this is very, very young immature plant. Right here is another one. This right here is a little piece of ginger that I planted, and it grew out from right here and grew this plant from that one piece. This is Survival Doc reminding you to be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced.