A Piece of Rainbow: Veggies & Herbs to Regrow from Table Scraps
Perhaps you are having trouble finding seeds to grow your survival garden. Some food can be grown from the scraps of food that you may already have on hand. A Piece of Rainbow has the article12 Best Veggies & Herbs to Regrow from Kitchen Scraps. If you do an internet search for “gardening with kitchen scraps” you will get a good number of web pages with similar titles. A Piece of Rainbow’s pictures seemed to be the easiest to understand with links to more detailed instructions. If you need more ideas on what scraps to use, then go ahead and hit that search link.
For a survival garden, or what the pandemic intarwebz are calling a victory garden, you want calories first and a balanced diet second. You’ll perish from a lack of calories long before you succumb to the illnesses associated with various vitamin and mineral deficiencies. With that in mind, the heavy lifters of garden calories are potatoes, beans, squash, and grains. You can include sweet potatoes and yams with regular potatoes. While potatoes, beans and squash are all covered to some extent in the articles on kitchen scrap gardening, most of the options are for greens. Those are great for vitamins, minerals, and variety of diet, but don’t yield a great many calories. But if you’re only supplementing other food supplies on hand, then they are a bonus.
If you’re really relying only or mostly on what you can grow, remember that there are a lot more edible and nutritious parts of garden plants than just the fruits and vegetables that you see in the store. Melon and squash seeds are packed with protein and some fats. Watermelon rind has some vitamin C and B6 as well as fiber. Zucchini stems can be cooked like penne pasta. The leaves of many plants are edible. Even some plants considered weeds by many are highly nutritious, like purslane. And if you’re lucky enough to be plagued with dandelions, the entire plant is edible from flower to root.
We love to regrow kitchen scraps, and propagate vegetable and herb trimmings for our garden. It is such a rewarding and fun thing to do, especially in winter and early spring.
Many vegetables and herbs from the grocery store will regrow easily in water or in soil. You can regrow fresh greens on a window sill indoors, or get a jump start on your herb and vegetable garden by regrowing kitchen scraps.
There are so many amazing people sharing their great tips and ideas on regrowing kitchen scraps. Let’s take a look at some of the easiest veggies and herbs to regrow!
1. Regrow beets from scraps.
When you cut the top off a beet, put it in a shallow tray of water. Beet greens will start to grow, which you can use in salads. ( Via Kimberly Stoney )
You can also plant the beet top in soil for a longer harvest. This trick applies to many veggies and herbs! ( Image source: SnapGuide )
2. Growing carrots from scraps.
Carrots are also root vegetables like beets. You can use the same methods. Carrot top greens taste a bit like parsley. They are very nutritious, high in potassium and vitamin K.
You can also grow them as a window sill garden for Easter fun! ( Via Instructables )
10. Grow grocery store potatoes
Similar to garlic, each potato can multiply into many potatoes. You can also grow potatoes from trimmings around the tiny sprouts growing from the eyes of potatoes
We have grown potatoes in large pots and it works really well. ( Via Stihl )
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