Jumpstart Your Garden: Regrow Vegetable Food Scraps

By Nutritional Anarchy

No matter what season you find yourself in or headed towards, a jumpstart in growing time is always useful to keep your organic vegetable garden producing (that’s one reason transplants are so commonly utilized).

Melissa Melton and Aaron Dykes demonstrate how easy it can be to regrow food scraps from their leftover organic produce.”

If you can’t figure out the basics, try these handy guides for more tips on how to turn your kitchen waste into a growing source of food:

• Don’t Throw It, Grow It!: 68 windowsill plants from kitchen scraps
• Food Scrap Gardening: How To Grow Food from Scraps, Reduce Waste and Feed the World (Gardening Guidebooks Book 8)
• The Scavenger’s Garden: Growing Food from Groceries and Scraps

Throw whatever you decide not to regrow into your compost bin, and keep the organic matter recycling back into a healthy and productive soil – Learn more with this important book on soil health, compost, mulching and organic gardening in Texas (or anywhere).

You Can Regrow:
– Spring Onions (Chives) are a wonderful choice because they are so easy, grow back in full in about a week, spruce up window space and add flavor to any number of dishes and soups.

– Celery can be regrown after the useful and nutritious stalks are juiced (our favorite), tossed into a salad or chopped into a stirfry. For some reason, though, our celery scraps turned to mush twice after it sprung up with new shoots.

– Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes and Yams: These root vegetables can regrow potentially massive amounts of nutritious foods after the eyes sprout. We put ours in a stick over water in the windowsill, while some prefer to quietly sprout them in a paper bag in a dark closet. Whatever you do, this one HAS to be organic or it likely won’t sprout, as most potato producers today add a pesticide (like BudNip) to shutdown the sprouts. Some beginning organic gardeners have reported growing up to 50 pounds of potatoes from one round tuber… we’re not there yet, but will certainly give it a try this fall.

– Ginger and Garlic: Quite a few root vegetables can be regrown from sprouts, and these healthy and strongly flavored foods are no different. Wait until a good healthy piece starts budding, encourage it with some windowsill light, then when its ready, pot it in some soil and give it some time – ginger could take up to 10 months, but it’s very easy and worth it.

– Onions: regular onions can be resprouted from a leftover base, then grown back to full size in some soil.

– Pineapple: You can regrow a lot of foods from scrap, and many people report re-growing pineapple. While it is feasible, it certainly looks like a lot of work – once it sprouts, it must be planted and may take several years to produce. But, maybe that’s just what you want to do. Good to know you can!

Try out these simple kitchen-back-to-garden tricks just for the experience or to boost your food production and shorten the cycle of germination–to–dinner plate.

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