TOPIC: Growing, seeds, introduction

Hello everybody! I'm from a little place in tn. I've been digging ginseng for the past seven years. It has kind of been a past time and heritage In our family. I have a few questions I would like to get some answers about.

1. A buddy of mine and I was under the impression that cultivated seed was fine to plant. It just matters the condition of where the seeds grow that determines if it is woods grown or cultivated plants? Last year we got some 1000 seeds online and we did some test planting and found out 80% came up great. So this year we got 10,000 seeds and went to the mountains and started planting. We were wanting to go back in 5 years to collect the plants.

This year when we sold our ginseng our buyer showed us some sang root from Wisconsin. It looked all different. Slick brown junk looking root. Now he doesn't even know if the Wisconsin seed is good to replant here or not.

So did we infect our mountains and ginseng spots?

2. I have a great place to start growing ginseng. 5 acres of hill side that naturally had ginseng growing in it. I have replanted sang here and it has been doing good. The plants that are here naturally is smaller sized roots and they are old sometimes up to 20 years. Seems like once the plants reach to 7 years the quit growing in size roots.

What is the ideal soil type for sang? Can you bring your soil to a certain ph level before the sang will be considered cultivated. I don't want it to be huge sang. Just average. I don't want it to be cultivated sang. Woods simulated, but I do want better roots than what I have growing now. I would like to take soil samples. What is the ideal numbers I'm looking for?

3. I would like to have a few plants and make them have as many seeds as possible by fertilize or how ever. Will the seeds that come off those plants be bad? If I use them as my seeds for my property to grow wild simulated will they be ok, or cultivated plants?

Thanks for your answers and I look forward of being an active member on this site!

cruff10,

In my opinion, there is no difference in seed as far as what kind of root it will produce. If you till the ground it will grow different than if you just plant it wild simulated. The thing I would worry about with artificial shade grown seed is bringing in disease. I have planted seed from several places and have had good results with all of them, but prefer seed from places that grow ginseng in the woods.

If you dont have a copy of Scott Persons book, you should buy it. The book covers just about everything. Scott is also a great person to buy seeds from.

As for the roots growing in your woods being small, it is probably because of too much shade and/or not enough calcium.

Good luck with growing ginseng, it is a lot of hard work sometimes but is also a lot of fun.

Lenno