The next time you toss your kitchen scraps, you might want to ask yourself if you can regrow them first!
That’s right! You can regrow some of your common peels and cores into a whole new plant. And in some cases, you don’t even need a garden. Is your mind blown yet? Good.
Here are 6 common kitchen scraps you can regrow into something else:
Celery/romaine lettuce/cabbage/bok choy. When you get to the bottom of a stalk of celery, a head of lettuce, bok choy or cabbage, take that white root end of the plant and put it in a bowl of water on a sunny window. Cover the root but not the top of the cutting. After a couple of days, new growth will start to appear. You can also put the cutting right into soil and keep it moist for a week. Soon, little green shoots will poke above the soil!
Ginger. Ginger is an easy food to regrow. Just take a piece of ginger root and pop it in potting soil. Make sure the little buds are facing up. Keep it out of direct sunlight, water it regularly and before long, you’ll have a new established ginger plant. When you want to eat it, haul the plant up out of the soil and use the root in your cooking! If you’d rather not eat the ginger, it will grow into very pretty house-plant if you leave it.
Onions. Slice the root end from your onion about 1/2 an inch from the root. Plant it in the garden and put a bit of soil on top. You can put them indoors in pots if you’d prefer. Either way, if you do this with all of your onions, you’ll never have to buy an onion again!
Garlic. Do you know what happens when you plant a garlic clove in the ground? It grows into a new bulb of garlic. Just plant the clove in a warm spot with lots of sunlight (be sure to plant it root end down!) and soon it will produce new growth. Keep cutting the shoots back so the garlic puts all of its energy into becoming a juicy garlic bulb.
Potatoes. If you have potatoes that have sprouted on you (this happens rather quickly with organic potatoes), cut the potato into 2” chunks being careful to have at least one or two eyes per chunk, and let those bits dry out for a couple of days at room temperature. Plant in about 8 inches of soil with the eye facing up. Cover with 4 inches of soil. As roots appear, add more soil. Soon you will have potatoes.
Pineapple. After you peel your pineapple, take that big green frond and remove any fruit that remains. (Alternatively, you can hold onto the pineapple nice and firmly while giving the leaves a good twist, which should take the stalk out of the fruit.) If you do not remove the bits of pineapple flesh that are hanging onto the leaf stalk, it will rot and might kill your baby pineapple plant. Remove the leaves on the bottom of the stalk so about an inch of the bottom is clear of them. Taking a sharp paring knife, carefully slice bits off of the bottom until you can see the small little circles start to appear. These are the plant’s root buds. Plant this pineapple crown in a nice warm spot and give it plenty of water. When the plant is established, water it once a week. Within 2 or 3 years you’ll have a home-grown pineapple!
Growing your own food is an amazing thing to do, and growing food from scraps, well, talk about saving money and reducing waste!
More from Dinner Diva Leanne Ely at SavingDinner.com.