The drive from Seoul to Geumsan is short enough to do in a morning and slow enough that you arrive feeling you have been somewhere. The road threads through the Sobaek foothills, past rice terraces and the occasional Buddhist temple, and into a low valley where the soil is the color of strong tea. This valley grows almost half the world's commercial ginseng.
I have come to visit the farm that supplies our root. It is not the largest farm in the valley; it is not even in the top fifty. It is a family operation outside the town of Bugang — three generations, sixteen hectares, an output of perhaps eight hundred kilograms of dried root per year. The current head is Mr. Kang Tae-seong, who is sixty-three and has been on this land since he was twelve.
I.
Ginseng is a slow plant. The wild root, which is essentially uncultivated and rare, takes between thirty and a hundred years to reach a meaningful size; the cultivated root takes between four and six. After six, the plant begins to lose vigor — the secondary metabolites that are valuable to medicine are produced most efficiently between the fifth and sixth year, and then plateau. After the seventh year, the root begins to fibrousize, and the price collapses.
The industry standard for Korean cultivated ginseng is the four-year root. Mr. Kang grows six-year root. The extra two seasons are, in his words, "the difference between selling something and selling something serious."
Why don't more farms grow six-year root? The answer is straightforward: it costs roughly forty percent more, takes roughly forty percent longer, occupies the same plot the entire time, and yields a smaller saleable quantity per plant because the older roots are more fragile. The market — by which Mr. Kang means the supermarket buyer, the export agent, and the large pharmaceutical cooperative — does not reward this. The buyer wants four-year, in bulk, at a fixed price, this year.
So most farms in Geumsan grow four-year. Mr. Kang grows six-year because he was taught by his father, who was taught by his grandfather, that ginseng is not finished at four. He has not changed his practice.
"It is a tree, not a vegetable. You don't ask an apple tree to give you fruit in its second year. You wait."
II.
The visible difference between a four-year and a six-year root is dramatic. The four-year is pale, thin, with the branching shape of a tap-rooted vegetable. The six-year is the color of old amber, the size of a man's thumb at the base, branched and rooted in a complex tracery. The dried six-year root, held to the light, is translucent at the edges.
The chemical difference is the part that matters to skincare. The active compounds in ginseng — the ginsenosides — accumulate roughly logarithmically with age until the sixth season. Rg1 (the ginsenoside most active in supporting microcirculation, which is what we use the root for) is present at roughly 1.3 milligrams per gram in a four-year root, and roughly 3.8 milligrams per gram in a six-year. Other compounds — particularly Rb1 and Rg3 — show similar increases. The difference in the actual extract we use in Geum Serum is significant; the difference in the customer's experience of the serum, less so. But we know what is in it.
Mr. Kang's wife, Mrs. Park Eun-suk, manages the drying. The roots come out of the soil in late September and are washed in mountain water, then transferred to a series of large, shallow trays in the family's drying shed. The shed is windowless and cool; the roots dry slowly, over three weeks, in shade. (Sun-drying is faster but oxidizes the more delicate ginsenosides; this is one of those traditional methods that has, on examination, turned out to be the right method.) After three weeks the roots are graded by size and color and stored in cedar boxes until pressing.
III.
I ask Mr. Kang what he wants people to understand about ginseng, in one sentence, the way I ask everyone I interview.
"Most ginseng is too young," he says. "It has been pulled out of the ground because someone wanted to sell something quickly. It will work, a little, in your tea or your soup or your skin cream. But it is not what ginseng is supposed to be. Ginseng is supposed to be patient."
We are standing in the drying shed at this point. The light is low — late afternoon, October. The shed smells faintly of earth and faintly of medicine. There are perhaps two thousand kilograms of root drying in trays around us, all six-year, all from this single hectare we are standing under, all destined for various buyers over the next twelve months. We will buy approximately seventy kilograms of this harvest. The rest will go to a clinical pharmacy in Daegu, to a tea producer in Hadong, and to two restaurants in Seoul.
The arrangement was Mr. Kang's father's arrangement. Mr. Kang has kept it.
IV.
There is a temptation, in writing about a craft this old, to make a sweeping argument about patience. The argument is real. It is also boring, because everyone already agrees in the abstract. What is harder is the specific case — to wait two more years for one specific crop in one specific valley because the science says the chemistry is different at six than at four. To accept the lower yield. To accept the higher cost. To not sell to the easier customer.
Mr. Kang's three children all live in Seoul. Two have professional careers; the third is finishing graduate school. None of them, currently, plans to take over the farm. Mr. Kang says he is not worried. He is healthy; he has at least another fifteen years of work in him; the farm will continue. He does not say what he will do if it does not.
We drink barley tea before I leave. He shows me the year's seed stock and the cedar boxes where the dried roots will sit for the next twelve months. The light by then has gone from amber to ash. I thank him; he tells me to come back in September for the next harvest. He does not say goodbye. He says see you in autumn.
— J.W.C.
Geumsan, Chungcheong-do. October 2025.
