When I started growing cooking ginger I just bought a healthy looking root at the grocery store and then immediatly planted it in a mid sized plastic flower pot in good soil. Then I placed the pot under my large oak tree and forgot about it. That was several years ago and it's still growing well and has even bloomed a few times. I use it in cooking from time to time but have never made tea from it.

I would probably try to split them all up, but I'm pretty fussy like that. You might be able to do a half and half split. I wouldn't just leave them in a clump like it is now though- again that might be just me being fussy rather than something necessary.

Good questions. Mine might be the same as yours but it's too early for me to tell. The leaves on mine are thicker than a Colocasia esculenta. In this pic it is 34 days old and it's from a grocery store produce section: https://st.hzcdn.com/simgs/f3f25c3509b40752_8-0583/home-design.jpg (pic is here on gardenweb) For my decorative-only Taros, I wait for a few frosts before digging them out. That's also when I separate the small pups from the parent and pot them. Then for the parent I'll decide whether to pot it or cure the corm. Thus far I've only potted these for the winter and all survived. Last year I may have waited 4-5 frosts because that's when the last flowers (inflorescences) stopped developing and died. I've read that waiting until after frosts forces dormancy which is better for potting or curing. I've also noticed that it's better to wait until then because the pups have more roots at that time. I've separated smaller pups with little or no roots in early and mid summer and most either died or took over a month to grow again. Next year I plan to harvest some of mine. I'll eat the ones with corms the size of the one I got in the store (pups?). The rest I'll either pot or cure (parent?). So I won't know which to harvest until I dig them out and see the corms.

I always repot all of my plants. I do this by blasting away the old soil with the jet setting on my garden hose sprayer. This washes away all of the old soil without damaging any of the roots. It makes everything a lot easier. Where I live, we don't necessarily have that much of a snail problem, though we have more than enough slugs to compensate for them. I've noticed that when I place my pots into a bucket, and fill it up to the soil line with water to let them soak, any slugs that might be in there will come to the top in order to seek higher ground. Any that I find get sent on to their next life, so to speak. They do this in my yard when we get heavy rains; they crawl up the sides of my house in order to escape the "floods." After the storms subside, I'll go around my house with a plastic hand shovel and send any slugs I find on to their next lives, too. This has kept my slug problem down to a minimum. Needless to say that I hate these pests. Fortunately, for me, I keep most of my plants up on shelves, tables, or plant stands, and they don't crawl up any of those. When they seek higher ground, they only crawl up the sides of my house. Which makes finding them and killing them much easier. The snails that we do have are very tiny ones, and aren't as problematic as the slugs are. Though, any that I do find also get sent on to their next lives along with their slimy friends.