How to Grow A Garden From Food Scraps
Who doesn’t like free food?
Well, if you’re growing a garden from food scraps that you would otherwise throw away, it seems like a winning strategy. You might be surprised how much food you can grow starting with food scraps! Here are three strategies for starting your food scrap garden.
Save those Seeds!
The easiest type of food scrap to use for growing more food is parts that you aren’t going to eat anyway. For example, once you get down to the core of the apple, or scrape the seeds out of the pepper or pumpkin before you cut it up, you can plant those seeds to grow more food. Some seeds can be quite large like the pits of peaches, nectarines, olives, or avocados, but they are seeds all the same.
The plant that grows might not be exactly like the fruit you got the seeds from if it was a hybrid variety, but it will usually grow some sort of edible fruit. However, if you are eating the fruit in the dead of winter, you may need to save the seeds until a more appropriate planting season, or plan to start them indoors.
Not all seeds in store-bought fruits and vegetables will sprout, especially fruits that were picked when unripe, but if you’re not going to eat the seeds anyway, why not give it a try? Of course apples trees can take years to mature enough to grow more apples, but peppers, tomatoes, and pumpkins are great for seed saving because they make lots of seeds and are easy to grow in a year or less.
What to do: save seeds, research seed starting conditions, plant appropriately, wait for sprouts!
Get to the Roots!
Root vegetables are easy to propagate (make more of) from even small pieces of roots. In fact, when you plant seed potatoes, you cut them up with a few sprouting spots (eyes) on each piece and they each grow into a new plant. You can do the same thing with store-bought potatoes. Especially the ones you may not want to eat because they are already sprouting!
Other vegetables that are easy to grow from scraps that have some roots on them include onions, beets, carrots, celery, and head lettuce.
What to do:
- For onions, celery, and head lettuce cut a thicker slice above the root part (3/4 – 1 inch) and put the root into water with the cut part out of the water. You should start to see roots growing in a few days and then the greens will start to re-grow from the center. Transplant to soil for longer lasting growth.
- For beets and carrots cut the tops off with a thick slice of root still attached (3/4 – 1 inch) and put the top in water, cut side down. The greens should continue to grow and can be harvested for salads and eventually the root will regrow as well. Transplant to soil once new root growth appears.
- For potatoes, cut sprouted potatoes into chunks that have at least one sprout. Plant in deep soil in a grow bag, container, or garden bed. Once the plant flowers and starts to die back, your free potatoes should be ready for harvest.
It’s all About the Cuttings!
If you don’t have the root, you can still get a plant going from a scrap branch or cutting if the plant tends to root easily or if you use something called rooting hormone. Once you get the roots growing off of your cutting, you can transplant into soil and have a new baby plant to grow until harvest. This is frequently done for herb plants and is how many rare plants are propagated.
Technically you could also graft the cutting onto an existing plant – where you cut a branch of the established plant and insert the new cutting and wrap it. This is frequently done with fruit trees and greenhouse tomatoes, but we’re not assuming that you have a bunch of plants around waiting to be grafted for your food scrap garden.
Some plants will naturally grow roots from anywhere on their stem if given the right conditions. Tomatoes, some squash, basil and a few other herbs make it easy to root cuttings. For other plants, you can use rooting hormone which is a chemical that encourages plant stems to form roots. Some plants (like willow trees) naturally create rooting hormone so soaking a willow branch in water can be a natural source of rooting hormone, or you can buy it at a garden store.
What to do: get a good sized scrap cutting with some leaves left, place in water, add rooting hormone if needed, watch for root growth, once roots are established transplant your new baby plant into soil until harvest
None of these ideas are instant, they all take some patience and time, but they don’t require much input besides that. Given that they all start from scraps you were going to throw out or compost anyway, what do you have to lose? Give it a try!
Want to learn more about starting seeds? Check out my FREE Super Seedlings Guide with my START framework five simple factors to make sure your seedlings get the best start in life.
