I have always been interested in medicinal plants and over the years I have grown a number of them. I also confess an interest in the less honourable members of the garden community and have grown a number of dangerous usually poisonous plants.
For a couple of seasons I experimented with Ginseng. The panax plants are the true ginseng, NOT Siberian ginseng which is just a fraudulently named plant that has nothing to do with the true ginseng.
My first experiment with Ginseng was with seeds bought on the internet. These never came up and I just gave up on that lot. as being bad seeds. I was later to find that they did in fact germinate in the little plastic zip bag they came in stored in the refrigirator. It had been over a year and I was (finally) cleaning out my fridge and I came across the little seeds all germinated. They grew but never flowered and did not live over a particularly nasty winter. I grow things in pots and some plants have trouble overwintering. I think its the freezing and thawing cycles in the spring that does the most damage. At any rate the ginseng croaked. My second and more successful experiment with ginseng was using small but viable roots I bought from the Korean supermarket. These are offered in cellopack and relatively pricy. A small flat was over $10. I know that there are local ginseng farms North of Toronto and I guess that is where they come from.
I chose a few likely candidates and used up the rest in juices and salad. Its quite bitter and a little goes a long way. In Korea, you might get a few slices served with a bit of honey. In Wonju where I lived for a year it was readily available and was grown locally in tented fields. I often saw ginseng farms and tasted the local fresh roots. They were about the same price as here. Pricey but not impossibly so. Since the ginseng I had seen growing was thriving in bright shade, That's where I put my plants. I had potted them in regular soil in black plastic pots I had. They grew slowly, I don't think Ginseng is a fast crop. It takes several years to get a sizable root. My own seedlings had a 3-4 mm thick root at the end of the first year. Maybe 5 cm long. The roots produced stems readily and soon I had several healthy plants. To my surprise they volunteered to flower and seed. I did not keep any over the winter but with careful placement I'm sure I could have. I have now a coldroom that could accomodate these if I chose to grow some more. | 
