Growing Food from Kitchen Scraps: Romaine Lettuce

Growing lettuce from the lettuce stump that you would normally throw away is relatively easy. Simply leave a stump, approximately two inches tall, and place it in water. I change the water every day, and within a couple of days, it will begin to grow. After about 2 weeks, you can plant it outside.

Harvest the leaves as needed, or you can also just chop the whole top off again, and leave it planted. Because it does not have to reestablish roots, it will regrow faster than the previous time. The best part about this is that if you have a lettuce stump to regrow every week, you should be able to eventually harvest an entire head of lettuce every week. It will not get as large as what you see in the grocery store, but it is surprising how much it will grow.

If you notice that the lettuce begins to grow very tall, and starts to have small flower pods develop at the top, you will want to cut this section off. If you do not, the leaves will begin to taste bitter. This portion of the plant produces seeds. When a plant goes to seed, you can use this to get seeds for a crop next year, but if you are not interested in seeds, allowing a plant to go to seed will simply make it taste bad.

Of course, I did not know this, as this was my first time growing lettuce, so I was just excited that I grew something so well that it started to flower :) . As you can see below, I started growing lettuce every week or two, so that I could continuously harvest them, and the one in the back left corner has "gone to seed", and will be bitter and taste bad (but I could collect seeds from this plant).

In addition to being (what I consider to be) amazing to watch grow in such a short period of time, this would be a great way to reduce your expenses, and to also have control over what you eat. By growing your own food, you can ensure that your produce is fresh, and also have it close at hand whenever you are cooking. I have also started growing herbs as well, and I have found that cooking is much more fun when you can go outside to grab whatever ingredients you would like to experiment with. They taste better than what you get from the store, and the fact that I grew them at home gives me a great sense of satisfaction. I will go over how to grow herbs more in a future post, but I would absolutely recommend saving your kitchen scraps, and seeing what you can get to grow at home!

Growing Food from Kitchen Scraps: Green Onions

I have recently discovered that you can re-grow food from your kitchen scraps. These include onions, garlic, potatoes, lettuce, celery, green onions, pineapple, and many others. This is a very economical way to get fresh produce, and also a great science experiment! Most of these plants take very little time to grow, and can be reused in as little as a week or two. My favorite plant to regrow is green onions, as they grow so quickly, and you can use them over and over again. To regrow green onions, simply place in water in a well lit area, and overnight, they will begin to grow.

These green onions, as you can see, start with a large amount of roots, and their growth is immediate. I have found that I have to find uses for green onions, or they start to grow everywhere. You can leave them in water, and they will continue to grow, but I have heard that after the third or fourth time of regrowing, they will start to loose some of their flavor due to a nutrient deficiency. I would recommend planting them at some point so that they can grow in soil. You can cut as much or as little as you would like based on your needs, but if you cut more than the top 2/3 of the plant, you risk that plant dying. Water every few days in soil, and I keep mine in direct sunlight, and they have been very happy.

These green onions were planted as scraps, each only about 2 inches long. They grow constantly, and are very tall after a month or so. I use green onions in my cooking weekly, so we are able to maintain some semblance of control over this plant, but as you can see, after two months, the plant begins to look a little unruly. The plant on the left side of the pot is a potato that I have been regrowing from scraps, and I will have a post about that one to follow.

I will go over many of the other plants that you can regrow from kitchen scraps, but since this plant grows so quickly and without fail every time (for me at least!), I would definitely recommend starting your scraps garden with this one!