Reduce, Recycle, Regrow

      If you're on Pinterest*, I'm sure you've seen the latest wave of pins on regrowing celery.  The first time I saw one of these pins, I was completely ashamed of myself for not having known this before.  Talk about an easy, useful way to reduce waste and save money!

       So, of course, I tried it immediately, and it worked like a charm!  After cutting the bottom off a bunch of celery, I simply plopped that bottom in a cup of water, and viola!  New celery were starting to grow the very next day!

      A day or two later, I was chopping up some romaine lettuce for a salad, and figured, well the bottom of that bunch looks just about the same, same style of root.  Why not?  Plopped the bottom in a little cup of water, and BAM!  More romaine starting to grow the very next day. 

      Next, I tried baby bok choy.  That also worked beautifully.  The week after that, it was full sized bok choy - also a hit.  Soon, we had little cups of starter plants lining our kitchen sill.  Once they started to get a little bigger, we *ahem* MacGyver put them into re-used pots with some soil to await their planting in the garden here in a week or two.

This is our kitchen sill today - one bok choy, one romaine, and one celery - all less than a week old (look at that bok choy grow!!!), and I find the halloween cups amusing.


       We go through a lot of veggies in our house, so we already have a lot of these little buggers going, and I don't plan on stopping.   At this rate, we'll have plants in so many different stages that we won't need to buy celery, romaine, or bok choy anymore.

      Even better?  This makes buying organic even more of a value.  I mean, I don't stress too much if I can't find a certain item in organic once in a while, but if I'm regrowing it, it becomes a lot more worth it.  And really, it's not hard to find most of these things organic. 

Some of the newly repotted plants waiting for a place in the garden.

      Another tip:  to keep your celery nice and straight, you'll have to put something round around the plants.  Websites suggest cutting the top and bottom off a 2 litre bottle, removing the label, and putting that around them.  It looks like a great idea - if you drink pop.  We really don't, so I think we're going to go with little wire cages.

      This really is a quick and easy way to save some money in the veggie buying department.  And there are a lot more to come.  I just wanted to touch on this one to show that not every step you take has to be labor intensive or costly.  In reality, a lot of them are just this quick and simple.  And a lot of them - like this one - actually save you money.

      And every little bit helps - both you, your health, your wallet, and your planet.

* As most of you have already heard me bemoan, Pinterest is now blocked at work, which makes me very, very sad.  I have not yet come up with a work related reason to get them to unblock it.  Apparently "It sucks up WAY less of my time than Facebook - which isn't blocked" isn't good enough.  :-(