How to divide container lemongrass
Lemongrass is an amazing tropical plant. Ornamentally, it is a perennial grass that provides lovely foliage and a clean lemon fragrance to landscapes. From the culinary perspective, it’s an essential herb in southeast Asian dishes.
We use lemongrass all the time; the smell is insane! It’s a crucial element for tom yum and tom kha soups (Thai sour soups) and for Vietnamese grilled pork. We slice it up and use it for marinades and curries.
To use lemongrass, remove the tough outer leaves of the bottom of a stalk. The inner softer and lighter in color parts at the base can be minced or sliced finely. The tops are a bit too fibrous - kinda like when you don’t eat the dark green tops of a leek, if you’re familiar with those.
Because we eat it all the time, I always have lemongrass planted in my yard. In case I run out or something tragic happens to my plants, I have a big ol’ stash of it in my freezer!
To freeze, just cut the lower part of your stalks into 3 inch segments and place them in a freezer safe bag. You can do this with lemongrass you buy at the store too - and you’ll always have some handy for your cooking.
During our last move, we had to dig up our lemongrass. We put them in huge buckets filled with water and told the movers to bring the buckets with them. (I’m sure they thought we were crazy, but the plants survived! They are the ones you’ll see in the tutorial below.
I’m always hesitant to continually move plants from place to place, because there’s a chance you’ll damage roots along the way or the plant tops themselves.
Lemongrass, however, is super stable for transplanting.
I’ll go over how to divide or propagate your lemongrass, as well as what happens if you damage the roots during this process.
When should you divide your lemongrass?
There’s no season to really do this for dividing lemongrass. I know, not super specific, but with most things in the garden, it’s about observation. And a little bit of personal preference.
Lemongrass will continue to grow tall and develop beautiful long trailing leaves. The older stalks in the middle will get fatter and young skinny stalks will sprout up around the older stalks. It will get to a point where things get crowded though.
If you wonder if it’s time to divide your lemongrass, you can check for a few clues:
Does the planting look crowded around the edges? Do you see little baby stalks trying to grow?
Take a peek at the inside of the plant. Do you see enough room for new growth or expansion if there are offshoots?
Are the leaves starting to brown at the edges?
If you answered yes to any of these, then perhaps it’s time to divide. It’s actually one of the more easy pruning jobs to do in the garden because it’s easy to recover from mistakes, which I’ll go over below.
And personally, I find it quite therapeutic. I divide my lemongrass every spring. I just sit in the lawn and split the roots, clean them up, and assess my plant’s health. I make any soil changes and give it some love for the next year’s growth. Because happy plants equals yummy plants. :)
Before we get started, I just want to remind you that the leaves on lemongrass are sharp along the edges. It may seem like a soft grass, but being cut by them is like an annoying deep paper cut. Trust me, you’re going to need your gloves for this task.
Read on to follow how I split my lemongrass plants from one container to two.
Step by step tutorial on how to divide lemongrass
This is what my lemongrass plant looked like before:
Hi! I’m Mr. Lemongrass. Those two barrels on the side of me will be my new home.
It was getting super crowded in there. If you were to take a peek inside you’d see virtually no soil, just tons of stalks trying to make their way up. There are little offshoots coming off parent stalks.
Also I can tell my lemongrass is getting a little stressed because the tips are starting to get brown and dried out, so there’s definitely not enough room in this container. Time to divide!
The first step is to dump the lemongrass from your pot.
Look at my roots!
Try not to damage the plant. It’s actually pretty sturdy in terms of plants and it grows back pretty easily. So don’t worry if you do.
Separate the lemongrass into chunks that you can easily divide
We tried to initially break this apart by hand. The lemongrass roots were so intertwined and quite strong, so we ended up slicing the large block into more workable chunks.
Like I said, don’t worry if you slice a couple roots. They grow back pretty quickly.
Divide the larger chunks into smaller chunks containing a few stalks.
At this point you’re going to want to remove the individial roots from one another. You’ll see that some roots have three or 4 stalks coming out of the same root system. If a stalk gets separated from its others, that’s fine too and it can be planted on its own.
Clean the stalks up a bit by removing the browned outer leaves and trim the tops, about where the leaves start to fan out individually from the stalk.
Ready to be planted!
Refill your pot(s) with new soil
Lemongrass likes rich, well draining soil, so make sure your pots have holes on the bottom. We filled our pots with the same raised bed mix that we filled our garden beds with. It’s a mix of compost and topsoil from my local nursery.
Plant your lemongrass and give even spacing to allow growth
Here’s a group that’s ready to be planted. Notice how we just left a group of them together like this. You can definitely separate them even further if you like, but it just takes a little longer to grow. We just left them this way because we had so much great growth from last season and these will grow into large plants themselves.
We did ours with about an inch or two between each grouping to allow the plants some growing room. You can plant up to about about a half an inch or inch of the lemongrass base in dirt.
We then covered the topsoil with my favorite mulch, which is Kellogg’s Gromulch. This keeps a nice layer on top to prevent evaporation and nice moist soil.
Give yours a good drink of water and you’re good to go!
Remember that lemongrass is a tropical plant, so it loves sun. Since we have these babies in containers, it’s always possible to move them to a sunnier spot if they seem unhappy.
How to fix lemongrass that you’ve damaged during transplant?
If for some reason you do end up chopping or damaging the roots, they regenerate pretty quickly in water.
My mom who lives in zone 6, keeps some lemon grass under the kitchen sink at all times. She also has a huge planter pot of it, but I feel like for some reason she’s always regenerating more underneath her sink. It’s easy enough that it makes sense to continually propagate more if you eat lots of lemongrass.
To regrow the roots, or propagate lemongrass, all you do is clean the dirt off the bottoms and chop off the grass tops to about where the leaves start to separate from the stalk. I also like to peel off the outer sheaths of grass to expose the younger growth towards the middle.
Place these stalks in container of water. Once you see some good root growth (about a couple inches) go ahead and replant them in fresh soil using the steps above.
