When people start thinking about growing some of their own vegetables at home , the task can seem simple at first, I mean how hard can it be to put a plant in the ground, water it and then enjoy the bountiful harvest of a fully operational farm? Yeah, not so much! Although a wonderful dream, to get the bountiful harvest of your dreams, it takes a lot of space, work and time! With that said there are millions of small tricks that can make growing vegetables a little easier. One way is to use kitchen scraps to grow plants ! Yes a lot of foods you disregard as not edible and/or trash can in fact grow into a plant and give you more fruits and vegetables! It is an alternative way of growing a vegetable garden then growing from seed or buying a bunch of plants.
Start Your own Victory Garden
What about Seeds!
You can gather seeds too!!
You can gather seeds of fresh vegetables like tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and peppers that will grow plants . Heirloom varieties are the best because they will reproduce the fruit just as tasty as the original!
Compost for your Kitchen Scraps!
Although many of your kitchen scraps are being saved from the compost pile , don’t forget to add some compost to your new plants to give them a little boost! Learn how to compost or Revive Your Compost Pile!
My Experience…
I’ve had my own vegetable garden for a few years now and I’m always looking for new ways to improve the harvest and balance the ecosystem of the garden. I believe that EVERYONE should grow some of their own food, even if it’s just one herb plant or one tomato plant! So with the unusually warm weather at the end of winter and beginning of spring my ambitions, and free time, were thrust into thinking/researching my vegetable garden. In the process I came across a blog that talked about growing celery plants from the discarded bottom of a celery stalk. At first I was skeptical but also intrigued. I had never thought of growing celery before but after doing some more reading and watching a few videos on YouTube to authenticate the idea, I decided to try it myself. It really was very simple. About a week later after using a stalk of celery for some soup and appetizers I decided to try it! If it didn’t work it was no loss of time or money to me! I cut the stalk down to the bottom and simply placed it in a small plastic bowl with a little bit of water. I placed it on the windowsill and basically forgot about it. Every few days I would check on it and change the water but within a week I noticed the top center of the celery, where the stalks use to be was rising! A few more days and they were definitely rising. Then one day when changing the water I noticed small white roots growing out of the bottom! It was working; growing from scraps was actually working! I waited a few more weeks before transplanting the celery outside due to cooler weather and in the mean time I started a second celery plant in a different bowl, this one also began to grow! Finally on the last week of April when temps had warm enough and the threat of frost seemed about gone I planted both stalks in a pot on my back deck. They are growing bigger each day and in a few months will have fresh celery stalks from my backyard!!
Celery isn’t the only vegetable I’ve been able to use kitchen scraps to grow! Last year I stumbled across growing potatoes. We had a bag of potatoes that got lost in the pantry, when we found them they had begun to spud, so without thinking I throw them into my compost bin. For the next two months I was pulling foot long sprouts out of my compost bin, each one anchored by a chunk of potatoes! I decided to plant them in mounds and in pots as an experiment and to my surprise I actually got some potatoes, granted they weren’t that big but then again I didn’t really give them the room they needed either.
Another fun kitchen scrap to recycle is the top of pineapple! Yes pineapple! This one I have yet to successfully do and from what I have learned can be very time consuming, taking at least eight months of bright sunshine to grow fruit. Like the celery you take the top of the pineapple, where the leaves are, and pull it off, and then you pull some of the bottom leaves off and place in water till it takes root. Once the roots appear you can plant it in a pot. Growing pineapple may be more difficult because it is a tropical plant that needs warm sunshine for a long time, which isn’t available naturally in the northern latitudes. Never the less it can be accomplished and in fact can be very fun!
Finally I have to mention sweet potatoes because as I was growing the celery and researching what other kitchen scraps I could use to grow food, my favorite show NBC’s Community had a Law and Order inspired episode where the infamous study group had to investigate who killed their science project. The project, growing a sweet potato plant from a sweet potato!
NBC Community Growing Sweet Potatoes
Joel McHale holding up the sweet potatoe plant as evidence in NBC’s Community paradoy episode of Law and Order! Growing plants from sweet potatoes!
NBC
Benefits!
Benefits:
-less garbage/waste in your trash
-real cost of the food you bought goes down because you are getting not only another plant out of it but also more vegetables
-alternative to starting a garden
-Fun experiment, especially for Kids!!
Other Food Scraps to Grow!!
Some of the vegetables and fruit that can be grown from scraps include:
Carrots
Beets
Turnips
Rutabagas
Garlic
Ginger
So take a moment and look at the kitchen scraps you throw into your compost bin…do they have any seeds? Do you ever find plants growing out of your compost pile? Has the scrap ever grown any shoots off of it? If you say yes to any of those questions then you may have a vegetable scrap that can be used in your back garden!
Easy way to grow vegetables from kitchen scraps!
Whole Foods
