Cooking makes gardening so much more exciting for me. Understanding where the food I eat comes from and how to grow it is incredibly rewarding. One hack I have been using to grow our garden is using kitchen scraps. I buy food to cook with, and will likely cook with it again, so learning to propagate from kitchen scraps has become a natural next step. Here are a few of my favorite kitchen scraps to grow in the garden.

Green Onions

This is where I started, because green onions are easy to grow, and we use them all the time. To grow them in the garden, I leave about three quarters of an inch of the bottom bulb with the roots when cutting them up. They work best if the roots look healthy and white. Then I put them in moist soil in a sunny spot. As long as I keep them watered, I find they grow back fairly quickly. I keep a small container near the kitchen so I can easily transplant the bulb fragment after cooking. Once they get to to be about four or six inches tall I transplant them to the garden and start my container over.

Green onions, transplanted in the garden.

Depending on what I'm making I might just go out and trim some of the green off the top of the onions to chop up and put in a dish. Alternatively, I can pull up the bulb, chop it up as I did before and restart the onion. An advantage of growing your own green onions is that you can decide how large you want the bulb to be. The longer you leave it in the ground the larger the bulb will grow.

Pineapple

It is no surprise that pineapple does not grow natively in Colorado, so it has been exciting to experiment with growing them here. I have read that it takes about two years to get a pineapple form a pineapple plant, so I have not yet been able to harvest. However, I have several pineapple plants currently growing. To start them I cut off the top leaving about a half an inch of fruit attached to the leafy green top (the greener the better). This can be planted directly into the garden. I like to loosen the soil and augment it with a little compost before planting. Not all Pineapple's will take and I suspect it has to do with how much water they get upfront. I have been experimenting with different amounts of sunlight and am finding that full to partial sun seems to work. I am interested to see what the end product is like.

One year old pineapple plant.

Basil and other herbs

I have had the most success propagating basil. To propagate I cut a stem off a healthy basil plant, and place it in a glass of water, being careful to remove any leaves that would be submerged. In about a week I find roots sprouting from the sides of the stem and can plant it in moist soil in a sunny location. In the beginning it's important to keep the soil moist, but not waterlogged. Once the plant is established I can treat it like any other basil plant.

Basil ready to be planted in soil.

I have been reading that other herbs such as cilantro, rosemary, parsley, and mint can be propagated in this same way. I'm currently experimenting with this and excited to grow my herb collection.

Ginger

When buying fresh ginger at the store I look to see that it has nodes. These are bumpy nodules on the ginger root. Healthy nodules, nodules that are not too shriveled, mean that the ginger can be planted directly into moist soil. A tutorial I watched recommended only partially burying the ginger while it got started. I did that and was amazed at how quickly it sprouted. Once the leaves got to about six inches tall I transplanted it to the garden.

Ginger plant ready to be transplanted.

Red, yellow and white onion

Recently I started experimenting with growing larger onions the way I grow green onions. I was skeptical because frequently these onions do not appear to have healthy roots, and sometimes they don't have roots at all. When I cut up the onion I leave about a quarter inch of the bottom bulb where the roots are or should be. It can be tricky to find the right container but I find old jam jars seem to work best. I fill the jar with water and place the onion over the top of the water, attempting to keep most of the onion out of the water, only allowing the roots to touch. My success rate has been about thirty five percent, so not great, but when they take I start seeing green shoots and then I know I can plant them in well watered soil.

Yellow onion before transplanting.

There are so many options when it comes to gardening with kitchen scraps. Squash seeds, potatoes, garlic, and more. Thinking about the food we eat and using it to grow the next generation is incredibly rewarding.