Garden Pharmacy – Turmeric

I put turmeric in my tea every morning. Just a half a thumb sized piece of fresh turmeric, sliced fine, tea poured over it. Add a little grating of black pepper because the piperine in the pepper makes the curcumin in the turmeric useable, and I have my tea with milk. It sounds odd but it tastes really good – a little chai slant on ordinary black tea. For my second cup I just pour more tea over the same turmeric.

And I notice the difference it makes. If I skip it for a few days I start thinking I need a massage and moving like an old lady. All my aches and pains, old injuries, muscle soreness, stiff joints start to complain. If there’s pollen around I need to take an antihistamine. I can’t get comfortable in bed and I need to get up in the night to pee.

I’m not imagining it. Turmeric is probably one of the most researched plant medicines and there’s solid evidence of its value as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, anti-anxiety agent. It’s protective against arthritis, allergies, metabolic syndrome, and brain aging. It reduces blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and LDL cholesterol. And all of these in the kind of doses you get just from regular, daily incorporation of it in cooking and drinks – about 3 grams per day of delicious fresh rhizome.  

Curcuma longa, family Zingiberaceae (the ginger family), Turmeric.

I grow quite a lot of turmeric. Besides my daily tea, I also use it in saag, dhall, pakora, dips, eggplant pickles, mango pickles, lime pickles, kasundi, spicy kale pancakes, Malay style noodle stir fry, added to flour for dusting fish, in nut butter, in curries of all kinds and dozens of other dishes. The turmeric I grow is a bright, deep yellow colour, and I’ve come across research that says that this has a higher curcumin content than the orange turmeric I see in markets sometimes.

It’s a tropical plant. It grows quite happily here on the NSW north coast, but the further south you go the more you will need to find a warm microclimate. It does quite well in a pot, and I know Tasmanians who grow it successfully by moving the pot indoors for winter, and out to the warmest spot they can manage for summer. It grows a metre or so tall with broad leaves and underground rhizomes which is the part you harvest. It will grow in full shade, but you get best yields from dappled shade, good deep well-drained soil, enough water (remember, it’s native to wet climate places), and no competition. It’s worth giving it VIP treatment, because a single plant will yield a kilo or so of rhizome, which is more than 300 times your 3 grams a day, roughly a year’s medicinal supply.

In autumn it flowers, and the flowers are so beautiful, it is worth growing for them alone. Then the leaves die off and the above ground part disappears entirely. I have been known to forget where I planted it and be unable to find it till it sprouts again in spring. Here in my subtropical climate, it’s later to sprout in spring than you would think. Mine has only emerged in the last few weeks.

Most times, I leave it in the ground year round and just dig up a hand to use each week. But last year my daughter needed to clear an area where it had been planted and so harvested the lot in late autumn as it died down. She dried some for powder, and I kept about a kilo in the fridge where it lasted fine all through winter and spring. The last of it has just run out, so I’m glad the dormant ones scattered all over the place have resprouted. Otherwise I would be digging up the yard searching for them.

There’s a good review that covers most of the medicinal use research I found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5664031/

You will find the rest of this series by clicking the tag Medicinals.