Bubba Baba

Bubba Baba is a blue-fleshed culinary ginger maintained and distributed as certified organic seed by Hawaii Clean Seed on the Big Island of Hawaii. Its origin is unusually well documented for a ginger: a traveller in India was handed a single rhizome by a guru known as Brother Baba, with instructions to pass it to someone who would treat it with the respect it deserved, and it eventually reached a Hawaiian grower who planted it in his greenhouse. Successive rounds of selection over several years intensified and stabilised the blue pigment in the rhizome flesh, which is dramatically stronger than the faint blue ring found in ordinary Chinese-type ginger. The grower named the clone after Baba, who granted permission on condition that profits support worthy causes and that his photograph accompany every box of seed sold. It is one of the very few edible gingers marketed in North America under a genuine cultivar name rather than a country-of-origin label, and it reaches home gardeners through retail plant sales such as the Friends School Plant Sale in Minnesota.