The worst part about grocery shopping is when you hand over your credit card — food is expensive! What makes it worse is we don’t eat everything we buy. There are leftovers that can’t be saved and there’s usually a cucumber we find rotting away in the back of our fridge drawer. It happens to the best of us.
However, there’s a whole lot more that can be done with what we don’t use in our kitchen. Leftover produce can be used as compost or even replanted in your home garden. It’s a lot simpler than you think. With the cost of living these days, why not get the most out of your money?
Here’s a few tips, rules and hacks to remember when repurposing your food scraps.
Compost
Starting up your very own compost pile is easy. You’ll want good air flow, heat and moisture to encourage decomposition. Raking your scraps and soil regularly, as well as keeping them well watered in direct sunlight, will cover all your bases. You can eventually add this dark, rich soil to your garden, or use it to pot new plants.
Leftovers of almost any kind are welcome. Egg shells, fruit and vegetable peels, old tea bags, soured milk or stale bread are a few good starters. You should also add coffee grounds into your compost. They add nitrogen to your soil and help repel pests.
Let Your Fruits and Veggies Rise Again!
Growing your own food is so underrated. Why regrowing isn’t a part of every household backyard or kitchen counter is a mystery — because it’s simple, easy and more convenient than you might assume.
There’s a long list of produce scraps that can be repurposed, but here are a few popular ideas you might want to apply to your garden.
Celery: Behold the perfect beginner grower’s scrap: a celery stalk base. It’s one of the easiest vegetables to regrow at home, and a staple to keep in the house. Celery sticks make the perfect snacks, with peanut butter or ranch dressing, and also make great salad toppers.
When repurposing your celery scraps, cut off the base of the cluster. Place the base in a shallow bowl of warm water, and expose to direct sunlight for as long as possible each day. After a week, you will notice leaves sprouting up from your base, and it will be time to plant your growing celery stalks in potting soil. Water regularly, and enjoy!
Pineapple: What would look cuter than a pineapple top in a sunshine yellow pot? Besides being the perfect windowsill decoration, pineapple tops can eventually make a beautiful, long-lasting addition to your garden.
Most people have the best luck potting pineapple tops in sandy soil. Bury the head of your pineapple under the soil so the dirt covers everything below the base of the leaves. You’ll want to keep your plant moist, and in indirect sunlight for the first two months of growth. After the initial six to eight weeks, a more mature root system will begin to form and you’ll be able to replant your new pineapple tree.
Avocados: A staple super food, avocados can be cooked into brownies, used as salad toppers, blended into smoothies and added to any Mexican dish. A quaint little avocado tree wouldn’t be the worst thing to plant near a bright window or added to your backyard garden area.
After pitting an avocado, save the seed. Use toothpicks to suspend the pit in a shallow bowl of water, with half of the seed submerged. It may take a while for you to notice growth, but be patient. It can take almost six weeks to notice a stem appear on your avocado pit. After your stem grows to 6 inches, trim half of it away to leave about 3 inches. This helps stimulate growth, and before long your sprout with sport leaves and be ready to plant.
Potatoes: Another easy plant, the potato is the perfect addition to any food garden. After peeling your potato, find a peel about 2 inches long with multiple eyes visible on the skin. This peel can be planted immediately in direct sunlight, about 4 inches below the surface. It may take several weeks to notice growth, but a sprout should be visible in no time.
As we stated earlier, there is an endless list of vegetables and fruit scraps you can turn into growing plants. Do your research and find the foods that work best with your cooking style.
No more throwing away spoiled food in the trash — that must feel good! By repurposing food scraps in your garden — whether as plantings or as compost — you can save some money and feel good about helping the planet at the same time.
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Originally Published: 7/24/2017 11:01:00 AM
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I am skeptical about a lot of tips on regrowing food from scraps. I've tried celery before and it's not this easy -- celery is a finicky plant that requires a lot of nutrients to grow, and has to be blanched unless you are okay with very dark, bitter celery. When I regrew my celery from scraps, visitors in the garden couldn't identify what vegetable my celery plant was unless I told them, because it was so dark and branchy. I've also tried avocados with no luck. Potatoes use the energy in their tubers to provide that first burst of energy, so I don't think a potato plant grown from a small piece of skin would be very successful. Many of the suggestions in the linked article suggest to plant the seeds in your scraps, except that most commercial vegetables are hybrids and many are sterile hybrids. If you are planting seeds from an heirloom veggie though, then that's a great idea. Most fruit (including apples, cherries, peaches) do not grow true to seed so you can grow them, but they won't produce a tree/fruit that looks like the parent. "Johnny Appleseed" planted apple seeds because it was against his religion to graft a tree (it was considered violent). The fruit from the trees he planted were no good to eat; they were used to make hard cider. The only scraps I have been super successful with are garlic and onions (planting the bulb/clove). You could do potatoes, but I think you would want to sacrifice at least part of each potato (a piece with 1-2 eyes and a good amount of tuber attached) and at that point you may as well buy a whole potato and cut it into pieces to plant. And at *that* point you might as well buy a few seed potatoes that will perform better in your garden than a grocery store one bred to perform under large agricultural conditions.
Gooddirt18 I bury all my food scraps in my garden
gooddirt18 I dig a hole in my garden and bury all my veggies and fruit scraps.
Gooddirt18 I bury all my food scraps in my garden
Another way to use food is to feed them to chickens and other animals, but where I live here, the animal that I feed food scraps to are worms which produce castings. I have a vermiculture setup that is really easy to use. The worms themselves can then be fed to chickens or used in fishing.
Do you ever have those squishy and/or sprouted onions in the bag from the store? I plant them skins and all, root end down. You don’t even have to bury them, as long as the root end is in contact with the soil, they will grow. They not only regrow quickly, they divide themselves into 4-5 new onions! Great way to also get some “green onion tops” for soups, salads, nachos,etc.!
I am sharing my experience, We have vegetables and food from the market is not 100% organic food, it is missed with poison liquid as you know the people spray the plants to grow the vegetables and fruits faster, My lab professor referred a guide it helps me to plant and prepare a good organic food for healthy life. Check the guide here >>( http://go2l.ink/plants ) <<. Now my family my relations are using this technique to get quality vegetables and fruits. All the best .*