Regrow Food Scraps At Home With These Super Easy Tips
Whether you’re looking to save a few bucks or simply limit your amount of food waste, trying to regrow food scraps is a great option! It’s easy, simple and can be surprisingly fun. You can also get your own mini food scraps garden growing inside your house, so no need to worry about not having enough space, or having outdoor space to regrow your food. Anyone can regrow food scraps!
Tip 1: Save seeds
If you’re like most people, you chop up your produce from the grocery store or farmers’ market and then discard your scraps. Instead, I challenge you to not only start saving scraps in a container to donate to a local compost project, but also to collect the seeds for yourself. Once you start collecting seeds to regrow, you start noticing how many of your favorite foods have the potential to repopulate. I mean, take bell peppers for example. Those things often come with TONS of seeds inside, and they’re pretty easy to start growing from seeds. Also, with that many seeds, your odds of getting some pretty awesome bell pepper plants are high, especially if you keep on collecting.
Tip 2: Keep chives alive
Have you ever noticed that a lot of the time, when you buy chives (or green onions, scallions or whatever you call them) from the store, they still come with the roots attached? This is great news for regrowing! Chives are awesome because they grow so quickly and that one bunch from the grocery store can last you a lifetime if you keep taking care of it. I especially like to keep chives regrowing because they’re an awesome addition to almost anything and are SO easy to take care of. At first, you simply just place the stalks into a jar with water in it, replacing the water every day or every other day to keep it clean. After a while, you should start to notice the roots taking off. Once they’ve grown pretty substantially, your chives are ready to be planted in some soil, where you can keep them growing, and keep your personal chive supply repopulating.
Tip 3: Making more mushrooms
If you’re a big fan of mushrooms like I am, you’re going to love this re-growing hack! Because mushrooms are a fungus, they repopulate differently than most plants do, and can often be considered easier to regrow than a lot of other foods. Since they spread from their spores, you can take the stalk of your favorite mushrooms and transfer it to a pot with moist soil. Moist is the keyword here! Your mushrooms won’t survive if your soil dries up. There are two ways it can go from there, your mushroom might rot (which is common, and doesn’t mean you did anything wrong in particular) or it can repopulate from the spores and really take off. While this process requires some trial and error, it can be so fun and satisfying to see regrown mushrooms thriving!
Tip 4: New life for your lettuce
Lettuce is another one of the easiest veggies to regrow. When you cut up lettuce, most people cut off the base or stalk since it’s not that pleasant to eat anyway. However, instead of wasting this, you can use it to regrow lettuce at home. All you have to do is place the base into a dish of water. Similar to the chives, you’re going to want to change out this water frequently to keep it fresh. After a little while, you might start noticing leaves growing and reforming from this same stalk. You can either transfer your lettuce to soil or simply keep it regrowing in the water! It may be easier to transfer your lettuce to a jar over time though, as it might topple over as it grows upward.
Once you start regrowing foods at home, it can be hard to stop. It’s easy to realize how fun the process of gardening can be, especially when it’s this easy AND free! Not to mention, sustainable! These tips offer a great jumping-off point to explore the world of regrowing food scraps as well as gardening in general. So, if you’re interested in pruning your green thumb, start here and see where it takes you! Happy growing!
Have you ever tried regrowing foods at home? How did it go? Let us know in the comments!