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| Peter’s Curcuma bloom |
Last winter when it snowed, the temperature rarely, if at all, exceeded 45° for a period of at least a week. We had snow on the ground for a full seven days in some areas, an exceedingly rare occurrence here. This substantially increased the number of chill hours experienced.
Some fruits such as peaches, apples, plums, and others require a more prolonged period of cold than we usually experience in our North Florida area. Chill hours, or chilling hours, refer to the total number of hours during a plant's dormant season (typically winter) when the temperature is between 32°F and 45°F. These hours are crucial for certain deciduous fruit and nut trees to properly break dormancy and initiate flowering and fruit production in the spring. We usually grow varieties here that require less chill hours, but even they benefit from a prolonged cold period in the winter.
One gardener had hundreds, maybe thousands, of plum on two native plum trees in her yard where before there had been very few. Another gardener has so much fruit on her peach tree that the branches are weighed down and one of them broke..
Peter’s turmeric, which was started from rhizomes obtained from the VegHeadz garden, and is therefore the same variety, for the first time bloomed In glorious color with both male and female flowers. The bloom looks very much like a Siam tulip (Curcuma alismatifolia), which is in the same family. It doesn’t seem likely that a subtropical plant would benefit from chill hours, and maybe Peter’s turmeric receives more sun than the plants in the VegHeadz shady food forest. (See comments below for further clarification.)
Some fruit bears heavily every other year. Maybe this is the year, or maybe the chill hours have jazzed up fruit production for one season.
What brought this to mind is something unrelated, as far as we know. Master Gardener Peter G. has a turmeric plant (Curcuma longa) that has bloomed beautifully this summer. Turmeric usually doesn’t appear above ground here until late May or early June. If it blooms, the blooms at the base of the plant are unobtrusive.
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| Turmeric (Curcuma longa) bloom in the VegHeadz garden. |
Nature’s mysteries are one of the things that makes gardening so interesting.
Comment from MG Dave Skinner who specializes in raising gingers: I just wanted to let you know that the Curcuma you showed in the blog post is not the spice turmeric. It produces white coma bracts in the summer well after the foliage comes up. The photo you posted is C. zedoaria, C. elata, or one of the other spring flowering Curcumas. Those species produce inflorescences before or just when the rhizomes break dormancy and start to produce foliage. They have various common names but never are called turmeric which is only applied to the species Curcuma longa which has the fleshy yellow-orange rhizomes used in curry and other Asian dishes.
ReplyDeleteThe spice turmeric is Curcuma longa which produces a white flower in summer above ground level and somewhat hidden in the foliage like Curcuma petiolata (called “hidden ginger”) and several other of the summer flowering Curcuma species.
Great information. We love setting things straight.
DeleteFurther comment from Dave S. After we speculated that Peter’s flowers may have been grown from some.“White turmeric“ shared at the VegHeadz garden, and after Dave did some further research:
ReplyDeletePeter may have Curcuma zedoaria. Looking on-line I see that some people have started calling it “white turmeric,” but it is not close to the true turmeric Curcuma longa. C. zedoaria was usually called Zedoary in English speaking areas as a common name but someone started using the name white turmeric because it has white fleshed rhizomes, but then so do many other species of Curcuma.
To avoid confusion and mistaken identities we really need to stick to scientific names of plants except perhaps for the more commonly grown plants that have a long history of established common name usage. Even then, the common names can make confusion when there are half a dozen common names for the same species, or when the same common name is applied to several different species. I would certainly recommend at least including the scientific name along with the common name whenever writing about plants when there could be confusion between the species.
Additional information: We have learned that the rhizomes of Curcuma zedoaria were purchased at a farmers market in our area. They were sold as white turmeric. The rhizomes are reported to smell like mango, and to taste more like culinary ginger but with a bitter aftertaste.
ReplyDelete