I just want to briefly recap my 2019 season as it's been quite a ride for me. Maybe where some of you were many, many, many years ago.
My neighbor (who was friends with the guy who use to rent our house before we bought it) said despite looking, he'd never seen any seng on my property. He actually sold ginseng to the renter. lol I had subtly broached the subject with him after watching a few episodes of Appalachian Outlaws. This was in the winter of 2018 and prior to seeing that program, I had no idea that a ginseng culture existed.
Despite us just meeting, my neighbor showed me a few of his plants and was going to show me his honey-hole until a bear trotted by and we decided to follow it instead. Why wouldn't we?
Mid-Sep 2018 I found one plant, with three-prongs by accident in a place I didn't expect to find it. Cool, I had one. I also planted last fall but as I stated in another thread, not in such a way that I could determine how successful I was. Rookie!
Then in May 2019, thanks to the droning of a bee, I saw a plant which led me to finding several more plants nearby. I decided to search my whole property and found two more locations with several plants established. I was pretty excited at these findings since I was told none existed. I had quite a few three and two prongs but no four prongs that I've seen.
I planted about 80 berries from these plants and increased my seed order and am almost done planting them. I'm already anticipating next spring when the established plants come back to life and and I'm in the woods counting seedlings.
Through ginseng, I've learned to identify more of the native plants in this area and really just look at the woods differently. I've been taking a Master Naturalist course since March and much of what I'm learning ties into ginseng in some way.
I appreciate everyone's help the past several months. I enjoy reading your fish tales and other adventures and hope to share some of my own in the future. I haven't fished or hunted in years myself, but hope at some point to do so. Probably once my trail running days come to an end. We'll see.
