I am a big fan of Thai food.  A while back my friend Dao taught me how to cook my favorite Thai dish, larb.  Larb is a mix of usually boiled meat (such as chopped pork, chopped beef, chopped chicken) mixed with sauteed and fresh herbs such as Thai ginger, mint, some other stuff.  It's pretty good.  Actually, it's really good.  So I started growing some of the ingredients: mint, lemon grass, Thai ginger, a copule others.

Lemon grass is pretty easy to grow, and besides cooking it's got a lot of uses in the herbal medicine world.

Growing Lemon Grass

I'm not the "Lemon Grass Gardening Expert" (LGGE?), but I have managed to grow some pretty decent bunches of lemon grass.  My wife bought some stalks from the farmer's market, we put them into a glass of water and let them sit until they started putting out roots.  Then we transferred them into a container of soil, which we eventually transferred into one of the raised beds.  It was that much of a no-brainter.  If you try this yourself, try to get lemon grass stalks that have as much on the bottom as possible.  The stuff propagates pretty much on it's own, grows fast, and I don't see anything trying to eat it besides me.

Eating Lemon Grass

I've had lemon grass in both tom kha gai and tom yum, and in larb.  I like them all, a lot.  I'm getting hungry just thinking about them.

Medicinal Lemon Grass

Journey to Forever has a neat article about using lemon grass as a base for mosquito repellant.  DEET sometimes gives me a rash, so this might be a pretty workable alternative, one that I'll probably try this weekend.  They list some other info, as well as links to other pages about lemon grass.

Summary

I think growing lemon grass in the East Hawai'i garden makes sense.  It's useful for cooking, useful as a mosquito repellant, and grows well and easily here.

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