How to Grow Lemongrass
The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers
Epic Gardening
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2019
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anyone who likes Asian cooking is likely to be a fan of the lemongrass plant. With its lemony, slightly-bitter citrus flavor and aroma, it’s commonly used in food.
But what very few realize is that it’s fairly easy to grow at home if you’re in a warm climate. Even cooler-climate gardeners can grow it outdoors during the late spring and summer. It’s easy to bring a small clump indoors for the cold months, allowing you to grow it year-round!
So let’s explore the citrusy sensation that is lemon grass. Not only is it good for food, it’s great in the landscape!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's going on everyone? Welcome back. It's Kevin from Epic Gardening. Back from a pretty insane trip last week. I was |
| 0:07.0 | touring with the National Garden Bureau all the way up California from San Louis Obispo to North of Sacramento checking out a bunch of vegetable |
| 0:16.0 | readers. So these are companies that are developing new varieties, traditional |
| 0:20.2 | breeding techniques, not a GMO type of thing. |
| 0:22.8 | And it was just very cool to see all of the different |
| 0:26.0 | pieces of technology that go into it, all the research |
| 0:28.2 | that goes into it, and all the reasons why companies |
| 0:31.5 | are breeding new and different varieties of plants for either |
| 0:33.8 | appearance or growth habit or flavor or disease resistance. So hopefully I can |
| 0:38.8 | bring some of that content to you guys in the next couple of weeks. please stay tuned for that but today we're talking about |
| 0:47.1 | what has become one of my favorite hybrid edible style plants to grow because it has an ornamental vibe to it as well. |
| 0:55.3 | So this would be the lemongrass plant, right? |
| 0:57.6 | Lemongrass, if you grew up in an Asian household, you're going to love lemongrass. Ch pretty good and I've actually been drinking a mixture of lemon grass and lemon balm tea |
| 1:07.6 | I think the ratio is about two to one lemon grass to lemon balm and that's been a fantastic |
| 1:12.4 | fantastic way to kind of wind down my evenings |
| 1:15.2 | every time I go to sleep. I'm trying to have a little bit more sleep hygiene these days. That's a popular topic. |
| 1:20.5 | But so let's go ahead and talk about lemongrass or Simpogon citratus. I believe I got that correct. |
| 1:29.0 | There are a wide variety of plants in the Simpogogenus and only a few of them are lemon grass. |
| 1:36.4 | Many varieties do have that distinctive aroma, but that actually does not make them edible. |
| 1:42.0 | So we have to make sure that we're growing the right ones. Now of course if you're going to the nursery you're going to be growing the right one. But I figured why not give you this information? It's a little bit interesting and just expand your gardening palette a little bit. |
| 1:52.6 | So the first one you have is Simpogon-Sitratis, |
| 1:55.4 | West Indian lemon grass, and this is the most popular for culinary use. |
... |
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