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Category: > Health > 12 Vegetables You Can Grow From Scraps

12 Vegetables You Can Grow From Scraps

Mar 28, 2013 Carly Fraser Save For Later Print

Last Updated: Apr 20, 2020

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celery sprouting from base

When you are on a budget, re-growing your food scraps is one of the best ways to save money! In fact, there are many vegetables you can grow from scraps, whether it be from cut off ends, or from the seeds they bear. This will not only help keep your wallet fuller, but it is an incredibly sustainable way of living!

12 Vegetables You Can Regrow From Scraps

There are many different vegetables you can regrow from kitchen scraps. All you need is some water and a shallow pan to get started. In some instances, you don’t even need water, and can directly plant your sprouts into the soil.

1. Garlic

garlic sprouts

You may have a couple cloves of garlic laying around – why not grow them? The key to successfully growing garlic to plant them in full sun, and to remember to chop off the tall stalk that sprouts from the bulb. Once you cut this piece off, the garlic bulb will instead put all of its energy into growing large bulbs for tasty consumption.

2. Potato or Sweet Potato

yam sprouting

Cut about one-inch of a chunk from a potato that includes 1-2 eyes. Give the piece a day or two to dry out and skin over. Then, plant with the eye facing up.

3. Pumpkin

pumpkin seed sprouting

During Halloween, you may take your pumpkin seeds and throw them in the oven to make some roasted pumpkin seeds (or you may just eat them raw – which is totally fine, and they taste amazing!), or you may throw them out. Why not plant some pumpkins from the seeds? Pumpkin is rich in nutrients like beta-carotene which protect your eyes from nasty free radicals which leads to poor eyesight. Find out how to grow pumpkins here.

4. Avocado

avocado sprout

Avocado trees are actually quite easy to grow, and they are beautiful plants to keep inside or outside the home (they have a better chance of fruiting outside, where they can be pollinated by bees). To find out how to grow an avocado tree from the seed, click here.

5. Scallions

green onions sprouting from onion

Cut off the last inch of each onion, so that you still have the bulb and roots (lower white part). Put these ends in mud, making sure to leave a portion of each stem sticking out above the soil. Water regularly, and your onions will start growing. You can take cuttings from the green portion of the plant, and it will still continue to regrow more greens. You can do this about 3 times before you will need to plant more bulbs.

Alternatively, if you have some onions that are already sprouting greens, you can place their root-end in a mason jar of water, and fresh greens will sprout on top.

6. Carrots

carrot sprouting

Those carrot tops you usually toss into the garbage can actually be used to produce more carrots! You cannot physically regrow the carrot from the carrot top, but you can regrow the plant. Cut about one inch from the top of a carrot. Stick a toothpick into either side of the carrot stump and balance it on top of a small glass. Fill the glass up with water so that the water barely touches the bottom edge of the stump. Set this glass in light, but not in a window that has full sun. Continue to add water as it evaporates, and soon you will have sprouting roots from the carrot edge. You can now plant your carrot in mud!

7. Apples

apple seed sprouts

Apples can be grown from the seeds inside, as with any fruit. To grow an apple tree, take the seeds from the fruit and lay them out to dry until there is no more moisture on the outside of the shell. Next, lay the seeds on some damp paper towel and place them in the fridge. Make sure the paper towel remains damp, so checking ever so often is a must. Once the seeds have been in the fridge for about one month, the seeds should have sprouted. Take your sprouted seedlings and place them in a small cup of potting soil, making sure that the soil remains moist but not wet with watering. When the plant starts to grow, make sure you transplant as needed, until you can finally grow your tree outside.

8. Ginger

ginger sprout

Soak your ginger root overnight and then cut it into pieces. Make sure that there are a couple of growth buds on each piece (the little bumps on the end of each “finger”), and plant the ginger with these growth buds pointing up or to the side (do not have them facing down). Then, water regularly, but not so much that the soil becomes soggy. Harvesting your ginger is easy since all you need to do is dig up pieces of the root, and cut off what you need, leaving what you don’t. It will continue to grow.

9. Romaine

romaine sprout
Image via dor615 / Flickr

Growing romaine is the same as celery. Cut off about an inch from the bottom of the romaine stalk, let it sit in water to wait for roots and slightly longer growing leaves from the top, and then re-plant in the mud! Any time you want to harvest leaf lettuce from your garden, just pick the outer leaves but leave the inner leaves untouched. This will ensure that your lettuce continues to produce new leaves all season long.

10. Celery

celery sprouting from base

Cut off the bottom inch of a bunch of celery, and place this piece in a bowl, with the cut side facing up. Add a little bit of water, just enough so that the bottom of the celery is submerged in water. Move this bowl into a sunny place in your home, and water for the leaves and roots to form. Then you can plant the celery in soil, covering everything cut the leaves, and within a couple of weeks, the stalks will start to grow back.

11. Pineapple

pineapple sprout

A lot of people have seen or heard that you can re-grow pineapples, and I am currently in the process of doing so (I will let you know how it goes!). To re-grow pineapple, I followed these steps.

12. Bok Choy

bok choy sprout

Same method as celery and romaine: see above.

*Note: You can also re-grow many other fruits since they have seeds that can be easily sprouted and turned into a plant. For example, I have used this method to re-grow tomato plants from tomato seeds, and mango plants from the mango seed.

various plants sprouting from cuttings with text - 12 foods you can re-grow yourself from kitchen scraps
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Filed Under: Food Education, Health Tagged With: gardening, re-grow food, sustainable living

Carly Fraser

About the Author

Carly Fraser has her BSc (Hons.) Degree in Neuroscience, and is the owner and founder at Live Love Fruit. She currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with a determined life mission to help inspire and motivate individuals to critically think about what they put in their bodies and to find balance through nutrition and lifestyle. She has helped hundreds of thousands of individuals to re-connect with their bodies and learn self-love through proper eating habits and natural living. She loves to do yoga, dance, and immerse herself in nature.

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Comments

  1. Cristine says

    Mar 26, 2020 at 1:45 am

    Do you have to cut off all of the leaves on lettuce to regrow? Can I leave the inner leaves to put in water for roots to sprout?

    Reply
    • Carly Fraser says

      Mar 28, 2020 at 9:50 am

      Yes, you can do it that way too!

      Reply
  2. Brenda Dumas says

    Mar 27, 2020 at 10:27 pm

    I’ve tried the pineapple too and the avacodo seed for regrowth. It’s exciting to see the growth.

    Reply
    • Carly Fraser says

      Mar 28, 2020 at 9:49 am

      That’s amazing! I really want to try a pineapple one day 🙂

      Reply
  3. Erica says

    Apr 6, 2020 at 9:43 am

    How can I keep growing basil?
    I bought a potted basil in store, and would be great if it’d keep growing..

    Reply
    • Carly Fraser says

      Apr 8, 2020 at 9:29 pm

      You would have to take a cutting of the basil from the stem and place it in a glass of water on the windowsill where it can get good sunlight. Use a clear glass so you can watch your basil propagation grow roots. Change the water every few days until you see root growth, then leave your basil propagation roots to grow to about 2 inches or so. You can leave it in the water and new buds should pop up, but if you really want it to take off, I would put it in soil once the roots are established!

      Reply
  4. Robert J. says

    Apr 14, 2020 at 3:55 am

    How easy is turmeric to grow?

    Reply
    • Carly Fraser says

      Apr 14, 2020 at 3:40 pm

      It’s not too difficult, as long as you live in the right zone. I have been successful growing it in Manitoba, but not many roots formed (the green shoots popped up everywhere though). I think it would need a greenhouse, or maybe I just didn’t do it right. In warmer zones, I imagine it would be quite easy! Some say it grows like a weed.

      Reply
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  1. Home education 8: Science experiments – Have the fourth one first says:
    Apr 13, 2020 at 7:43 am

    […] You can also try using spices (coriander, mustard seeds, fenugreek etc), or the links here and here have some suggestions for sprouting vegetable […]

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