How to Grow Lemongrass and Propagate it FOREVER

I'm crammed in my front yard garden right now, not to show you this beautiful basil or this amazing, amazing flower, but this somewhat boring looking grass behind me, which is lemongrass. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. And despite its visual appearance, it is an extremely easy to grow, useful, flavorful, aromatic herb, I suppose you could call it, but it really is a grass that you can grow in your garden. So in today's video, we're going to go A to Z, exactly how to grow, propagate and care for lemongrass. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for 20,000 gallons of Tom Kha soup. And let's get into the video. Hiding behind this basil bush right here, I have another lemongrass plant, but there are two main types. So you have Cymbopogon citratus, which is West Indian lemongrass, which is the more commonly used one for culinary purposes. Then you have Cymbopogon flexuosus or flexuosum, I forgot which, and that's East Indian lemongrass. It's a little bit smaller in its growth habit, not as fragrant, but can still be used. As far as light and temperature goes, if we think again, always think about where the plant came from. So this is a tropical plant. It really loves the heat and it really loves a lot of sun. So this direction right here, going this way, is south facing. So this is getting hit by sun all the time. Now this basil bush is shading it out slightly, but it's going to want six to eight hours of sun and a decent amount of heat. In fact, it really doesn't do that well if temps drop below around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So we're back in the shadier section where I've propagated quite a bit of lemongrass over here to talk about watering. Now I wanted something a little low maintenance and lemongrass is a plant that wants to remain damp to some degree at all times. It really doesn't want that soil to dry out. And so I sacrificed maybe a couple hours of direct sun for a little bit slower growth, but I wanted to make sure that it was damp at all times. So that's what you really want to do as far as watering goes. I'm watering with drip tape here and it really doesn't dry out as this soil is a little bit heavier in clay, which speaks to the type of soil that it wants. It can tolerate a wide variety of soil conditions. If you want to mix your own soil to grow it in a container, I would say just use a standard potting mix. You could even add a little native topsoil in there if you wanted to fill it out a little bit. But that's pretty much it. Now, if you want to fertilize, which I haven't yet found to be necessary for my lemongrass, you'd want to skew towards an organic fertilizer that's a little higher on the nitrogen, the N of the NPK. Because again, we're not growing it for anything but its vegetation and its root, its root section, which you'll see in a second. And that's going to be using up quite a bit of nitrogen to get those leaves nice and full. So if you do want to do that, maybe sprinkle some chicken manure around or any other high nitrogen organic fertilizer. Now, my favorite part probably of growing lemongrass is the fact that once you grow it successfully, once you really have it for life, because you can propagate it many, many different ways. And in just a second, I'll show you a really cool tip with my friend Supani. But let's talk about it for a second. So the first and most common way is probably to propagate it by division. You have these clumps that will grow up. And what you'll notice here is I have two separate ones. So I could just split these right down the middle. And as long as there's root tissue on both, they're going to keep going. They're going to start their own new lemongrass clumps and they'll be completely fine. Now you can grow it from seed. I don't think that's the best use of time unless it's just purely for the joy of growing lemongrass from seed. It's just a lot slower. Now the cool part is take a look right here. You can see this sort of dead rotting away piece of lemongrass and you might be wondering, well, what's this from? So I learned this tip from my friend Supani who runs a really beautiful and delicious Thai restaurant in San Diego called Supani House of Thai. So I went to her garden where she grows all the lemongrass for her restaurant. And I learned a really cool propagation tip. This is how I replant it. Okay. You see all this root. I always break them out like that. And I put this over there. This one is good. So this is for eating. For eating. And this is going to go in the ground. So you can replant these ones. Oh my God, it's so easy. That's why they call it lemongrass. Oh, that smell. I wish you guys could smell through the screen right now. It smells so nice. Do you see some of the leaves come out like that? So basically every time you harvest, you get to replant every single thing. Everything. This is over here, I harvest. And this is like maybe a week ago. And they're already coming up, huh? They're already coming up because it's so easy, like grass. And with the rain. Yeah. There you go. Easy. Supani from Supani House of Thai. Pretty cool tip from my friend Supani. In fact, the lemongrass in the patch that you saw at the start of this video right over there is a patch that I started from these little sections of root. And it's beautiful because you can actually still harvest the rest of the lemongrass. So let's talk a little bit about some annual maintenance, some pruning, and then finally harvesting. So if you're in a zone that's colder than I would say maybe 45 degrees as you get towards winter, you want to dig those clumps up and store them in a warmer place over winter if you want them to come back. Because if they freeze or get below that, they just will actually fully die and you'll have to go buy or start new lemongrass. If you're in a warmer zone, then what you can do is you can just harvest as you please and it will keep on coming back. And so speaking of that, what you would do and these are young, the part that you're really wanting when you're growing lemongrass is you peel these back is this little section right in here that just smells so good. Now you can still use the leaves, but the leaves are best used extremely fresh and do not store well. Whereas these can store well. So you would take off a nice thick chunk of the stem. You'd strip off maybe a couple of these leaves and you'd isolate that white inner material. And what you could do is you could dice that up and freeze it or of course you could just use it fresh. Now some other things that you'll want to do as your lemongrass grows, imagine this bushes out a lot, is as you see dead stalks and stems, you can just pull those and then just clean it up. You know, it likes to kind of bush out and then not every single thing will make it. So you just kind of clean it up as you go. But really it is a really easy plant to grow. If you see things like yellowing leaves, then it's either underwatering or probably a low nitrogen issue. So you can just correct one of those two problems. There is a host of pests and diseases that can attack it, but it's no different really than any other thing you'll find in the garden. And so we've got videos on how to deal with all of those. But guys, lemongrass is a great way to like pepper it into your beds, throw it in places that other things wouldn't thrive. And then you get this beautiful, beautiful plant that you can harvest and use at will. So I hope you enjoyed it. It's one of my favorite plants to grow. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.