How to Obtain the Planting Materials From Your Everyday Meals

Food can be costly. You’d agree if you’ve ever been the one to do the monthly food shopping. You can’t live without food, and since you won’t be able to produce all of your food needs, you can at least grow some.

Now, you may believe that locating planting materials is a time-consuming process in which you ‘scour the globe’ for the appropriate planting materials. This isn’t always the case, though. Planting materials for common food ingredients such as garlic, onions, carrots, potatoes, basil, and many others can be easily obtained.

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Today, we’ll show you how to make planting materials out of food scraps that would otherwise be thrown away.

Lettuce

Image by Petr Magera from Unsplash

It is relatively simple to grow lettuce and cabbage from scraps. Don’t throw away the rest of the leaves you cut out after you’ve gotten the chopped fleshy lettuce or cabbage you want for your food. Place them in a bowl with a small amount of water in the base. Beaty from DIY & Crafts suggests keeping “the bowl somewhere that gets good sunlight and mist the leaves with water a couple of times each week. After 3 or 4 days, you will notice roots beginning to appear along with new leaves.” You can easily transplant your lettuce and cabbage into the soil at this stage.

Spring Onions, Garlic, Onions, Leeks and Shallots

Everyday foods like spring onions, garlic, onions, leeks, and shallots are among the easiest plants to regrow from the roots. You just need to keep the roots submerged in water to keep them alive.

Images from Square Mile Farms

According to square mile Farms, you can follow the process below to achieve this:

• When chopping the green top of the spring onion, leave 3–5 cm of the white root.
• Submerge this part of the plant by placing it in a shallow jar.
• Place in the sun and replace the water every day.
• When ready, harvest right from the jar.

Sweet Potato

Image by Mark Stebnicki from Pexels

Sweet potato doesn’t go through the same simple processes as stated above, but it isn’t cumbersome to understand. You can’t plant sweet potatoes directly in the soil as it will generate a plant but will not produce any sweet potatoes.

So this is how you go about it. Cut the sweet potato in half and use any small firm, sleek sticks you can find to hold it up in a container with water. After some days, you should see some roots show up as well as nodes (what some people call eyes) on top of the sweet potato.

According to Beaty from DIY & Crafts, “once those sprouts reach about four inches or so in length, just twist them off and place them in a container of water. When the roots from this container reach about an inch in length, you can plant them in soil.”

Ginger

Image by Jocelyn Morales from Unsplash

You can easily grow ginger from a spare ginger from a ginger set you get from the market. Gingers, on the other hand, take time to sprout. Look for a piece with bumps on the surface of the ginger because this is where the new shoots germinate.

You can now simply plant it in potting soil, making sure the buds face up. In a week or more, you should see new shoots.

Garlic

Image by Mike Kenneally from Unsplash

You know that garlic clove that became too dry for you after you left it on the counter while choosing garlic for your meals? You’ll need it now. Divide the garlic cloves and place them in a jar with only the bottom of the clove in the water.

Replace the water every two days and place it in the sun. You can harvest the shoots once you see any signs of them. If you want the entire garlic bulb, however, you’ll have to plant these shoots in soil.

Plants with seeds

Image from Pixabay

I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone who doesn’t like pepper or tomatoes. These two are commonly used in a variety of staple foods all over the world. You probably didn’t realize that you can regrow them by simply collecting and sowing their seeds.

Square Miles Farms breaks it down to simplify the process:

• Try developing seeds by isolating them from fleshy plants. Chili peppers are easy, while pulpy foods such as tomatoes are harder. The removal of the pulp minimizes the likelihood of seed rotting and allows germination of seeds like tomatoes.
• Dry your seeds by placing them onto paper towels for up to a week. Place seeds on paper or dry cloth for one week to enable drying.
• Go on and sow your seeds and remember to water frequently.

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As you may have noticed, getting planting materials from your regular meals is quite simple. They are mostly scraps that you discard. It’s amazing how food scraps can be used to regrow the foods you consume.

Please let us know how you get on with any of these. Also, if there are any planting materials from our everyday meals that you’d like us to add, please let us know in the comments section and we’ll make sure to include them.

References

Beaty, V. (2014, February 20). 25 Foods You Can Re-Grow Yourself from Kitchen Scraps. Retrieved from https://www.diyncrafts.com/4732/repurpose/25-foods-can-re-grow-kitchen-scraps

Square Miles Farms. (2020, May 13). 10 Plants You Can Regrow From Kitchen Scraps. Retrieved from https://www.squaremilefarms.com/post/10-plants-you-can-regrow-from-kitchen-scraps