Trash Makes Good Eats

It started innocently enough. (Doesn't it always?)

I was travelling about the blogosphere and came upon this post about how to keep green onions growing indefinitely. Next time I was cooking with scallions, I put them in water to see what would happen.

My boyfriend saw my jar of food scraps in water and poked it with dismay, and asked what kind of science experiment it was.

Not long after I was feeding my blog-post cravings again and read their post about growing celery from leftover cuttings. And then sweet potatoes growing in a bag of dirt, started from - you guessed it - scraps.

I was hooked!

But I didn't really do anything with it. I couldn't really remember to water my scraps, and I'd planted two full on garden beds by then, so my attempts got left in the compost bin.

Fast-forward to about a year later, and my compost was frozen, Minnesota-style. I had a bunch of scallions I'd brought home from work and put in a jar of water just to keep it fresh, not really thinking anything of it. Then it doubled in size.

Maybe you know how expensive organic green onions are? And how far they travel? (Hard to have local, fresh produce in a Minnesota March.)

Then I remembered this whole propagation thing I'd read about, and with no real expectations, cut some ends off of the potatoes that had sprouted in my cupboard, the yam that had also sprouted in my cupboard, and the last inch or so of a celery bunch, and put them in water.

A month or so later, I have this:

Red potato grown from an otherwise inedible little tuber. 

And this:

Yam sprouted from similar conditions.

And this:

Brown / Russet potato, also sprouted...

And this crazy, beautiful thing:

Celery, propagated from the scrap left after cooking!

OK, so call me a nerd, or even call me Granola, but I think life is just gorgeous! And I get to eat what would have been thrown out. So this is food, free in the freest sense of the word. I rarely even water from the tap - I use the water left in the bottom of my glass when I don't finish drinking the whole thing at night. The soil is left from past gardening projects. The containers are old boxes saved from produce. Even the newspaper lining the boxes was free - saved from the community newspaper they keep throwing at my door every week.

On a day like that looks like this -

April 22nd, really? Snow?

- at the end of April, when my psyche needs to be outside gardening, and my financial aid money is gone...

...Looking at this sure is a balm to my soul. And it cost less than, well, nearly anything.

Beautiful, tasty, life!

BTW, everything I planted has already doubled in size. And I've got another celery 'scrap' almost ready to plant, as well as some carrot tops growing new greens in dishes of water. 

I can't wait to get out in the garden - but more than that, I can't wait to eat this things...again!

I wonder how many generations I can keep this up for?