Karam guides an attendee on how to scatter seeds at the Ginseng Cultivation Workshop.

Ginseng in Your Brain

Digging for Gold : planting ancestral and economic roots

Rural Action is an organization with values of supporting the economy, community, and the environment in rural Southeast Ohio.  The non-profit began in the early 90s, and instated their forestry department early on. The department works with landowners to assess the unique qualities of their land, and do research and restoration in the area. The group encourages productive forest management that can create thriving ecosystems and economies. 

Ginseng is an endemic species to Appalachia and beyond, and is considered a medicinal plant, adaptogen, and gentle stimulant, that can fetch high market prices, often over $500 for a single pound of forest grown dried roots.

Karam Sheban is the director of sustainable forestry for Rural Action, and Andrea Miller is the sustainable forestry manager. Together they work with a team of volunteers, staff, and the community to spread knowledge of forest care, and ways to use natural land in a productive and profitable way. 

Sheban contrasts forest farming with traditional “garden, or field agriculture, where you're going to make major modifications to the growing environment, you're going to till up the soil, you're going to irrigate it, or add fertilizer. In forest farming systems, we're generally talking about working with native biodiversity.”

The plant has had a long and complicated past, first used by indigenous people, and later colonizers, all for supposed medicinal purposes. The industry boomed in the 1800 to early 1900s, and the plant was harvested to the detriment of the population. It’s been speculated that where people find wild ginseng today may not be where it once thrived, but instead where weaker populations went unnoticed or unharvested.  This is why re-planting populations in suitable sites is so important to restoring biodiversity. 

Oftentimes, ideal ginseng locations can be found by looking at indicator species, other plants that share similar environmental requirements for growth. Miller mentions, “when I see it on a private landowners property, it's almost always associated with sugar maple, tulip poplar, basswood, and spice bushes … and some companion herbs, trillium, ginseng itself, ramps, black cohosh, blue cohosh.” It is also important to note the amount of decomposing logs and type of leaf litter a planting site has, which also affect the soils nutrient makeup.

Miller presents information at the Ginseng Cultivation Workshop.

Chris holds a bag of stratified ginseng seeds.

Christmas ferns are indicator species that a wooded environment is healthy and conducive to growing ginseng.

Andrea Miller speaks on her experience growing up with her great-grandmother, who was a ginseng steward, and dealer. “She grew ginseng and she stewarded it to sell and to use herself medicinally and make tea.” Miller comments on her great grandparents farm and property, and the computer parts that scattered the yard. Her great grandparents would strip copper and metals from the old machines for extra income, butcher and process animals to eat and sell, and her great grandmother gardened and maintained ginseng. “a lot of what they did was because of the economics of it.” 

Karam Sheban studied environmental science in college and took a forestry class, focused on harvesting timber, making him curious about other management alternatives. When he found Rural Action the approach of the organization and his own ideas clicked. 

“It's not just trying to accomplish environmental outcomes, but also improve people's livelihoods, and make these very direct connections to economic development and revitalization. And in doing that, using natural resources in a way that wasn't extractive.”

Appalachia has had a long history of exploitation and extractive practices in land management, through logging, farming, and mining. Turning this mindset around offers different opportunities. Karam views planting ginseng and native  productive plants as a way that people can make “money, but your property is healthier than it was when you started.”

He says the plant is interconnected with humans, with a history of humans being its biggest threat, and a future of humans being its biggest hope.  “I think people see themselves in ginseng in a variety of ways. It's long lived. It sometimes looks like a person. It's temperamental, sometimes it puts a leaf up, sometimes it doesn't, which has led to a lot of the lore about it, moving around, hopping up, running to another spot planting itself in a new area.” He thinks the plant, now more than ever, relies on humans to be its dispersers, and that Rural Actions work is facilitating this role. According to their records, they sold over 80 pounds of ginseng seeds this season, reaching approximately 600,000 individual seeds.

The department held their annual Ginseng Cultivation Workshop on November 4th. The educational event covered the specific planting and growing techniques of the plant, and offered stratified seeds for sale. 

Stratified ginseng seeds are kept refrigerated for 18 months and planted in the late fall to encourage them to sprout that spring. If not stratified, the seeds will take not one year, but two, to germinate. Treating the seeds this way gives growers a head start, as well as the seeds, as they have less time exposed to predators or unpredictable conditions.

Growing these plants in sync within the ecosystem allows the grower to be passive, and let nature do the work. One woman who purchased seeds said that she wanted to grow the plant because its growing style is more passive than traditional gardening.

Karam says if a grower follows “some of the practices that support a plant like ginseng on the landscape, you're basically supporting a functioning biosphere. You could look at it as one way, one expression, of the kind of changes we need to make as a culture in the way we relate to the natural world, to live in harmony and more sustainably.”

Karam describes the importance of leaf litter to the soils nutrient makeup.