Hi. Nathan here from the Outdoor Education Department of the Waterloo Region District School Board. Today we’re going to talk about food scrap gardening. Now this is a way that you can garden at home, at your next mealtime, and you don’t even need to have any vegetable seeds at home. Here’s how it works. We’re going to take some of the various foods that we might have in our house from the grocery store and we are going to find ways to grow or propagate new plants from those vegetables. I’m going to start with some of the plants that are really good for growing more food, and then we are going to move in order towards plants that are more fun to grow for education without any expectation that you are going to get food from it, at least not for a long time.

So let’s start with potatoes. Potatoes are pretty easy to grow from old potatoes. If you look closely you can see this potato is beginning to sprout. The eyes of the potato start to grow new potato plants. So you simply cut that potato in half or in quarters and you set it in some shallow water so that the plant stays moist. This also works with sweet potatoes. Here’s a sweet potato that has been sitting in this moist soil for about two weeks and you can see three little sweet potato leaves growing there. And that could eventually go out in the soil in the garden.

One of my favourite vegetables to grow are tomatoes. Now I typically grow my tomato plants from seed and I love to save seeds from the tomatoes that I grew in the previous year. You can also grow tomatoes from the seeds that come in the tomatoes that you might find at the grocery store or market. And one thing you need to know about growing tomatoes from seed: If you’re taking those seeds from the fresh tomato, you need to make sure that you remove the protective coating on the outside of the seeds. If you touch tomato seeds you know how they’re kind of like slippery, like they have jelly coating. So this is kind of fun. You squeeze some of those seeds into a shallow container and you let it ferment. You have to make sure it gets smelly. And as that jelly coating on the outside begins to rot, then you’ll be able to plant those seeds and grow new tomatoes. Here’s some tomatoes that are a few weeks old and you’ll notice that some of them, the younger ones, just have two smooth leaves, and then as they get their second set of leaves they start to look more like tomato leaves.

Bell peppers or other kinds of peppers you can grow from seed. If you’ve cut open a bell pepper before you’ll know that there’s lots and lots of seeds on the inside. Simply put some of those seeds into some moist potting soil or even dirt from outside.

Green onions are another great vegetable that you can propagate at home. So if I wanted to use some of these green onions in a meal, take the tops off and I’m going to take the rest of the onions including the bottoms with some of the roots on and I’m going just put in a jar with a little bit of water. And I can either keep that in the fridge to keep them green and fresh or put it on the counter if I want to watch them grow. Eventually I’d be able to put those outside and get more onions.

Celery is one of those vegetables that is kind of fun to grow, but typically we’re not going to get a lot of food value from growing it. So at the centre of the celery, there’s another Mr. Celery. And so if I took that base and set it in some water it would get nice and green in a couple of weeks. And if I’m lucky I could get it to root and once it has roots I can put it in some moist soil and get a new celery.

Other vegetables that work well are root vegetables like carrots or beets. If you look closely at the top of a carrot from your refrigerator you might notice little green leaves starting to sprout. One way to grow this is to cut the top off, leaving a little bit of the vegetable, and set it in some, a shallow dish of water.

Now just a couple of more vegetables or foods to talk about. One that I love to eat and I find very interesting is the apple. Now one of the most interesting things about an apple is that every Gala apple, for example, came from a graft or a clone of one original Gala apple tree. So if I plant seeds from this Gala apple, the seeds are not going to turn into trees that produce Gala apples. They’ll produce some mystery apples, perhaps some that have never been seen before. And I think that’s exciting. So, on the inside of your apple, take out those seeds, put them in some soil from the outdoors or in a container with some moist potting and have fun with that.

Avocado pits are large seeds. They’re kind of fun and you can set them in a shallow dish of water to encourage them to sprout. Or you can also take toothpicks and stick three or four toothpicks around the middle of the pit and that can help you rest it on top of a bowl or shallow dish so that the bottom is in the water and the top stays dry.

So I hope this gives you some ideas for how you can learn a little bit more about how food grows even without any extra supplies at home. And I encourage you to get creative and let us know what you grow.