 Hey folks, I'm going to show you what I have growing today and that's some American ginseng. I've already got some seedlings going. This is a fairly difficult to grow plant at several stages. I'm going to have to give you a little bit of background on though. These are native to North America. They're in pretty high demand for their medicinal properties. They do sell when they're grown in the wild. They'll sell for upwards of $500 a pound. When they're farm cultivated, they go for a little less closer to $50 a pound. But that fluctuates, but it's a very high value crop. This is used in a common cold remedy that sells by the name of cold effects. It's a primary ingredient, is the root of this plant. This plant's also a rare plant since it's been over harvested through the years. It does take 10 years in the wild to actually mature. That makes it really difficult to grow in numbers, kind of like with wild leeks. I'll take you through the process of how I got from seed to this stage where I have seedlings growing. Now like many wild plants, these require cold stratification. My go-to for that kind of thing is just using vermiculite. It's a Ziploc bag. All I do is I take the seeds. I add them to some vermiculite and then I moisten the whole medium. And I just kind of make sure it's even. The best way to do that is to start with the vermiculite. I add the seeds, kind of push the seeds into the vermiculite. So it's more in the center, not hanging out at the outside. And then I wet it. And I slowly wet it until it's just a little bit moist, but not damp. But you want to build a check by holding it like this and seeing if any water comes out. If that happens, then what you want to do is drain the water until no more water comes out. So once you have the right amount of moisture, what you're going to do is put this either in your fridge or leave it outside in the winter. The key is you want to have it between roughly 32 Fahrenheit to around 40 Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius and 5 degrees Celsius. Perfect temperature in that range would be the door of your fridge. So that's what I did. I left this in the door of my fridge. They say to do this for at least 90 days. I did that. These were actually in there for about 100 days. And when I did check, I already had them seeding. So these will germinate well in the fridge. And as this has been out of the fridge for several days, I see more and more germinating. When I did initially of the ones that were germinating, I added them to this pot. These have been growing for around five days. And so I just took the germinating roots out of them to a pot and then added a really light layer of loose soil over top. And I have two of these. And I've been growing these under light. I still have more germinating here. I can show you. I'm sure you can see some of these sproats. Okay. And like many of these types of things similar to wild leeks, this is a type of plant that doesn't like light. It grows better in the forest. So when this does get past the stage and I take them outside, I'm going to have to plant them in the shade. What some commercial growers do is they just put shade cloth over top. And so I'm going to simulate that when I do take them outside. One way I might do that is to use cheese cloth and just grow it like this. That's quite similar to how they're grown commercially. That way it'll filter out quite a lot of the light. Now when I am growing this under is some grow lights. I did a little bit of research and I found that I can safely grow these under grow lights directly, as long as it gets no more than around 10 to 15% of what full sun would give you. Now that can be measured in lux measurements. Lux is spelled LUX that measures the intensity of light. Regular daylight is around 110 to 120,000 lux. That's quite a high number. In different spots in my grow area, I can arrange from around 12,000 lux down to maybe 5,000. It depends. If I can just measure here, I'm not really under much light. The lux measurement for here is like 60, which isn't much. Now I'll show you where I have these growing. Now it's hard to get a good shot under this intense light since I have a really big compact fluorescent bulb there. That one puts out I think 150 watt equivalent. But there's my other American Jinsing. I'm going to put my lux meter just an app on my phone. That's going to tell me how intense light is. I see it's going between 8,000 and 9,000. That's a pretty decent range for what I need. So I know that it's not going to get too much light here. And it's going to be just fine. Now I'm just going to take the remaining sprouts from my bag and create another pot. Or two like this. Well, it's a long process, but I think it's worth it. And it's definitely something different to grow.