It's been heaven for ginger in South Africa this summer, and travelling around the ginger production areas – roads allowing, given the heavy rainfall - ginger appears more widely planted this summer, remarks Joachim Prinsloo of Sunreaped. He farms ginger in Kiepersol, Mpumalanga, and in southern Mozambique. It has been obvious from the amount of flowers sprouting in the fields that ginger was feeling very much at home this damp summer.
"Ginger is a tropical crop; it likes high air humidity, and it likes rain – it's been a very good year for ginger," Prinsloo says. "The crop is looking really good."
© Sunreaped
Joachim Prinsloo of Sunreaped in a ginger field, relishing the rainy summer
Next week, Sunreaped starts lifting for the Shoprite Freshmark group, a retailer that, he says, really values its relationship with the farmer, marking them out among local retailers. "Food Lovers' Market, too," he remarks, "is a bunch of open-minded guys with whom it's easy doing business."
Sunreaped has a list of ginger clients "as long as my arm", from a jam maker who cooks a candied ginger jam which, on toast, is excellent for a sore throat, he remarks, to juice manufacturing when the Brix allows. They aim to lift ginger all through winter, spring, and ideally into February.
It's not easy to predict the harvesting calendar for the rest of the year into 2027. It depends a lot on the size of South Africa's amount of imported ginger, but importers take note, Prinsloo says, of the expected abundance of locally grown ginger this season.
© Sunreaped
Ginger flowers abound this year, along with an excellent crop of rhizomes
For more information:
Joachim Prinsloo
Sunreaped
Tel: +27 76 123 0035
Email: [email protected]
