Unlandscaping
I spent about half of Saturday removing the largest of two massive clumps of shell ginger that had completely taken over one of our side yards.
This was a major back-breaking undertaking, and it isn’t finished yet – just the hardest part. It falls under the heading of cleaning up someone else’s horticultural mistakes.
In this case, it was a big mistake to plant shell ginger right up against the dining room windows in a yard that’s already long and narrow anyway. And I’m beginning to think shell ginger is a mistake planted anywhere, since it grows way too fast, and after flowering or after getting frost burnt, each stalk on the plant turns ugly and brown and must be cut off and hauled away, or else the plant looks crappy. Each of those stalks can reach 8 feet or more in height, too, and hauling off about 300 of them at a time is no real pleasure, either.
I had read from someone reliable – who it turns out either must have had a comparatively small clump of ginger or a large number of workers willing to do the heavy lifting – that you can soak the roots of this ginger sufficiently in water that it will just “pop” up with a little pressure from a shovel.
In my case, the clump I removed from the crater in the picture was probably 9 feet in diameter. Instead of popping out of the ground after a good soaking, this ginger clump responded to my leverage by breaking the handle of my fiberglass shovel.
In the end, it turned out that a wood splitter was the proper tool. I used it to split chunks away from the main ginger root clump, dividing and conquering.
If it ever stops raining long enough to dry out the root chunks enough to reduce their weight, I will haul them down by the river and see if they’ll grow along the bank. Probably not.
But the good news is, after a little raking, I’ll have the side yard back to use pretty much as I see fit.
This is something the new homeowner may want to consider, as he or she sets about landscaping a property for the first time. If you overdo it, beginning in five years or so, you might spend more energy pulling plants out than you did putting them in in the first place.
I wish a certain past homeowner here would’ve considered how big and fast those gingers grow, and decided on planting something else.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 17, 2008, 03 11 pm
