Food-from-scraps

I prepare a whole row for come-again crops.
So far this year I have two starts: celery &
romaine lettuce.

Instead of throwing away or composting the bases of store-bought celery, cabbages, leaf lettuces, and other cool-weather crops, you can grow new food. The base must include a root-bearing zone. This is a fun project for kids, because you see results in just a few days.

As, I prepare wide rows for my fall and winter crops, I also prepare a food-from-scraps row. It's usually a fairly narrow row about a foot wide. First, I bury kitchen scraps and compost down the middle of the row and leave a shallow swale on the surface so that water stays in place and soaks into the soil. Then I mulch the row with pine needles. Here's link to my wide-row article for more detail & photos.

So far this year, I have two starts in this row, celery and romaine lettuce. Over the years, I have had the best success with celery, so much so, that I never plant it as a crop from seeds or plants. Cabbage has also been quite reliable and I end up harvesting the come-again cabbage leaves well before my regular cabbage crops mature.

In my experience, celery is the easiest and we buy it regularly from the store. So here is a deep dive on this come-again crop.

When we normally use celery in salads and soups we cut across all the stalks until we end up with a stub. To prepare it for planting, I make a new, clean cut across the bottom to open up the xylem and phloem tubes into the root zone. Then I sink it into the soil about an inch deep and then irrigate. This is when the swale at the top of the wide row works its magic--all the water soaks into the soil.

The bottom of a celery stalk after we've used all the celery.

Before sinking it into the soil, I make a new, clean cut across the bottom.

After sinking it into the soil in the prepared row, I irrigate the area for the next few days if there's little or no rain.

The celery starts to grow after only a few days.

Here's what it looks like after it's established.
The old base is absorbed into the soil.

While the harvested celery stalks are small compared to store-bought bunches, the freshly picked stalks have much more flavor.

Beautiful celery...

Here are celery roots at the end of the cool-weather season. Once warm weather comes, the celery stops growing, but most of them continuously produce new stalks until then.

Cabbages are our second favorite choice, because sinking the bases of store-bought cabbages yields leaves to harvest in a few weeks, which is well before harvesting time for our regular cabbage crop. 

Beautiful come-again cabbage.

Sinking the bottom of one cabbage often yields several losely-formed heads.

Lettuces are worthwhile if they have a substanstial base, otherwise they wilt too readily compared to the celery and cabbages.

This romaine lettuce base had already put out new growth by the time we used all its leaves.

Here it is only three days after planting. Looks like it will provide a lot of lettuce.

Some people grow onion greens from the bottoms of onions, but since we have garlic chives and chives available on a year-round basis, I don't bother. So I hope you're inspired to try this easy method of growing food from scraps.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt