10 Vegetables You Can Regrow from Kitchen Scraps to Create a Recurring Harvest

Today, I want to share with you 10 vegetables you can regrow from kitchen scraps to create a recurring harvest. Hi, sweet friends. I'm Mary, and welcome to Mary's Nest, where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth, ferments, sourdough, and more. So if you enjoy learning about those things, consider subscribing to my channel, and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below. That'll let you know every time I upload a new video. Well, creating a garden from kitchen scraps is very easy, and it can be fun to do, especially if you're new to gardening, or like me, you just don't like to waste anything, or possibly if you've not been able to find any seeds, or before you even make the investment into seeds, you want to try something that's very simple and see how the gardening adventure goes. Well, today, I'm going to go over 10 vegetables that you can regrow from scraps, and actually, many of them are in a category. So the overall amount that you can grow is actually more than 10, such as like with onions, you're going to also have, if you just have your plain yellow onion, you can grow red onions, you can grow leeks, you can grow green onions. So I'll go over all of the different vegetables within each category, so it's actually going to wind up being more than 10. The first category that I'm going to cover are potatoes, and potatoes are very easy to grow from scraps, and you can grow any type of potato, including sweet potatoes. Now, I've got a red skin potato here, but you can use any type of potato that you have on hand, it doesn't matter. And what's nice about the fact that you can use different types of potatoes, whatever you may find at your grocery store, or at the farmer's market, over the course of the seasons, as different potatoes come in and out of season, you can pretty much have an ongoing harvest of all different types of potatoes. Now, potatoes are very easy to regrow, and if you have some like I did in the bottom of the bin of your pantry, and they're starting to sprout eyes, all you need to do is cut them in half, and you want to make sure that each half has at least two eyes. This side has a lot more, but there are two eyes on this side, and I'll kind of cut it on an angle. Then after you cut the potato in half, what I like to do is just put it on a plate and set it aside overnight. And then you're just going to let it dry out just a little bit. And then the next day, you can go right ahead and plant these. And you just want to plant them, cut side down into the dirt with the eyes pointing up. And it's as simple as that. Next up, we have ginger. And ginger is relatively easy to regrow. What you want to look for is a piece of ginger that has these little like buds that are almost starting to come out of the ginger. And that's basically what you're going to grow your piece of ginger from. Now, you may be given this ginger from someone who's already growing ginger, or you can just buy some at the grocery store. If you buy it at the grocery store, some recommend soaking it overnight in water, but just overnight, because sometimes ginger can be sprayed with growth retardants, so it doesn't create these little nodes that are starting to grow. But you can just, if you're not sure, you can just soak it overnight in water. And then the next day, all you're going to do is plant this with those little nodes facing up in some potting soil. And you can even start this right on your kitchen sill window and then we'll go and transfer it out into the kitchen garden. But it doesn't even need heavy sunlight. It actually likes indirect sunlight. So a little potting soil, plop that right in with the nodes pointing up, and you'll start to see some greenery grow. And I just want to mention, because I know some of you may have questions about this, is ginger technically a vegetable or is it a rhizome? And there are different schools of thought on that, but I sort of tend to think of it technically as a rhizome, but either way, the fact that we can grow it from another little piece that we may have left over from a recipe or something like that and create a whole host of ginger more than we'll ever need is just makes it a wonderful scrap to regrow. The next vegetable I want to talk about is celery. This is so easy to regrow. And as you use celery in your kitchen, for various recipes, whatever the case may be, when you get down to about two to three inches from the bottom, from the root, you want to save that. Now, I'm going to be making a salad tonight and a soup. So I'm going to set that aside to use. And often what I would do is put this in my bin for scraps when I make bone broth, whatever the case may be, where I would need some scraps. But what's even better to do is to regrow this into another bunch of celery. Now, there's a couple of different ways you can do this. You can take a plate and you'll want a plate that has a little bit of a lip on it because you'll want to put some water in here. And then you'll want to just put your celery down into the plate, change the water every couple of days. And what you're going to notice is that you may not notice the root. Celery is not a big rooter. That's the right word. You'll start to see some little roots probably coming out. But what you are going to notice is a whole new bunch of celery growing out of the middle. The other way that you can do this, if you prefer, this bowl actually worked quite well. Now, some folks like to remove these outer pieces of celery because they do start to become somewhat mushy because this can take a week to two weeks before it's ready to be planted in the soil. So you can take out these, take these outer leaves. Now, don't go crazy because you want to leave some of it there to help protect the new growth. That looks about right. And then you could just take your toothpicks and stick them in on all four sides. And I'll see if we can, now that we removed some of these, that it might fit in the regular size jar. And you can just suspend it like that. Fill it with water. I got to put a little more water in there. And then you'll be ready to watch this grow, change the water every couple of days, and then we'll get ready to plant it in the garden. It's amazing. And what is something that you should know so that you don't worry, and I will take pictures over the course of these next two weeks and add those to this video. You're going to see some browning, some discoloration of these outer pieces, but don't worry about that. That's completely normal. What you're going to be focused on is the new growth in the middle. And that's why some folks like to remove some of these outer pieces, because since this is going to become degraded, the more of the outer pieces you have, the more degrading there is, and it can become a little mushy. Now, it doesn't really matter. And you're going to wind up planting the whole thing. And in a way, it's almost like cold composting. If you've heard of that technique where you've just got some very mushy vegetables and being mixed with water and whatnot, it's sort of like automatic compost. So either way that you're comfortable doing that. And then this one doesn't even really need the toothpicks. And you've got a whole new bunch of celery. Next up are carrots. Now, from my research, what I understand is that you can't necessarily grow a carrot from a carrot. But what you can grow are the carrot greens, and they're very nutritious. And now this carrot's a little past its prime, so I'm going to save this in my bin where I keep my scraps for making bone broth. But what I'm going to do is cut off maybe just about an inch, just like that. And if you'll notice, it's already starting to sprout some greens. And I'll take a picture and overlay that so you could see. But all you need is a little shallow bowl or a shallow plate but something that can hold water. And you're just going to put your carrot green right down or your carrot right down into the water. And then you're just going to keep an eye on this. And as the greens grow, you'll eventually be ready to plant this in your garden. Next, I want to talk about the things that are in the onion and garlic family. These are very easy to regrow. You've got white onions, red onions, shallots. I got a little clove of garlic here. I got green onions. Sometimes you call them scallions. And I've got leeks. Now, with the red onions and the yellow onions and the shallots, what you're going to want to do is just cut off a small piece of the onion or if you're making a recipe and just save that part. So all you're going to do is just cut it like this. And that's the part that has the root. Here, this is the blossom end. You can go ahead and use that in your recipe. And now that you've got this end with the little bit of roots down on the bottom there, all you're going to do is take this and suspend it in some water. All you need to do is take a little jar like this. This is just a little jelly jar or even a cup like this would work. This would actually work very well, probably better than the jelly jar. And you're just going to take your cut piece of onion with the roots down and plop it down into the water. You just want the little bit of the roots in the water and have the top not submerged under water. And what's going to happen, which I'll show you in the future, is green sprouts are going to start growing from here. And then eventually we'll be able to plant that in our kitchen garden and we'll grow some onions. Now with garlic, all you want to do is peel off the skin. You don't want to crush it or anything, which I commonly do when I'm cooking. And you might even see sometimes your garlic will just start to sprout or begin to sprout naturally in your little garlic keeper. And at that point, it's probably not best to cook with, but it can be great to start sprouting to regrow other garlic. And then once you've got your little garlic bud, all you have to do is just put it in a little jar like this. This is just a little four ounce jelly jar. I just leave it up on one side. You don't really need to do all the toothpicks and everything, at least I've not found that to be necessary. And then just be sure to change the water regularly. And in a few days, you're going to start to see that a little green sprout is going to really come out full fledged and be ready to plant in the garden. Now, green onions and leeks are so easy to regrow. And with green onions, you may almost be tempted to literally just have a glass in your kitchen and submerge them and then just clip off the green onion as you need it, because it'll just grow and grow and grow. However, I recommend that you resist that temptation and that you eventually get them into your garden. And the reason is they're going to be richer in nutrition from the nutrients that they'll absorb from the soil rather than just constantly being grown in water. But the way that you do this couldn't be easier. As you're using up your green onion, when you get down to about this much, it's good to leave, you know, about two or three inches. Two or three inches for any of these is always sort of a good rule of thumb. And then what you're going to do is take your little green onion that you've sliced and you're just going to submerge it in some water. I mean, it just doesn't need toothpicks or anything. You know, like with the garlic, just let it kind of lean to one side. And what you're going to find, which I'll definitely be showing you all of this, is this is going to start to regrow. And it's going to start to regrow very quickly, literally within days. And then it'll be ready to go into the garden. And you really never really need to buy green onions again. As you grow them and you harvest them and use them in your kitchen, just always save the little base, just put it in some water, get it to start sprouting and in the garden it goes. And when it comes to leeks, you're basically going to do the same thing, about two to three inches from the base. And you're just going to go ahead and put this down into some water. It's going to start sprouting up and in the garden it goes. Next is fennel. Now I love fennel. I love it raw in salads. I love it cooked with fish. It's delicious. Any way you want to prepare fennel, I love it. And it always gives me a little chuckle because my mom who's Italian calls it, and please forgive my pronunciation if it's not correct, but I always remember hearing it being called finocchio. And that made me laugh so much because it sounded like Pinocchio. But at any event, with fennel, you know, as you're preparing it, just save a little bit and you don't even really need to be saving like three inches like you would with celery or some of the onions. All you need to do is save a little bit of the bottom, maybe like an inch. Then you're going to take your fennel and you're just going to put it in a shallow dish with some water. You could also use a little shallow bowl like this and put some water in there and put your fennel down into there. And again, change the water every couple of days. Also do the same I didn't mention, but with the green onions, you do want to, and the leeks, you do want to change that water every couple of days. And in a few days, you're going to start to see the sprouting and you'll start to see some little roots coming out on the bottom. And before you know it, it'll be ready to go into the garden. Next, I want to talk about leafy greens. You can basically regrow any leafy green. What I've got here is some romaine lettuce and some bok choy. And again, all you need to do is when you're making your salad and you get down to, you know, two, three inches, somewhere in there, you know, it's not an exact science, so don't worry. And you just want to get a little bowl and we're going to submerge this. Well, this one might not stand up. I might get a little smaller bowl, but we're going to go ahead and just submerge this in a little water and it's going to start to regrow off the top. It's actually going to work well in this cup. And you're just going to put this down into your cup and you're going to start seeing the growth come off the top. Bok choy can be done in a very similar way. Again, about two or three inches from the bottom. And then you can go ahead and just put this in a little bowl like this with some water or you can suspend it in a jar of water. This might need a wide mouth jar or you could put some toothpicks in, just so that like we did with the celery, but just so that the bottom is submerged in water and then you're going to start to see the new bok choy growing out from the top. Now, again, like we did with the celery, you can remove some of these outer pieces if you want because they do tend to start to become mushy, but basically just put it in a bowl, put in some water, change the water every couple of days and watch your bok choy start to grow. Next, I want to talk about cabbage. Now, this cabbage looks a little funny. It was a lot bigger at one time, but I've been using a lot of the outer leaves and now I'm going to use the rest of this cabbage to make a little small amount of coleslaw. But what you want to do if you want to regrow cabbage is again, you don't need the two to three inches like you do with some of the more stalky type vegetables, but all you really need to do is maybe just save the bottom inch of your cabbage. You can put that aside. And I want to mention, when we were talking about the romaine lettuce and the bok choy, if you have a leafy green like a iceberg lettuce, which does have more of the shape of the cabbage, you do something similar like you do with cabbage. You just kind of cut off that bottom core of the iceberg and you're going to treat it very much, the iceberg lettuce in a similar fashion as we're going to treat the cabbage. Now, this stalk down here, this is really hard. So what I'm going to do is just take a little bit of that off just to help make it a little easier for the roots to start coming out. Then again, all you need is a little bowl and some water and you're going to put your cabbage right in like that and you're going to start to see greenery coming up and it'll be ready to go in the garden. Next, I want to talk about beets. Now, beets are like carrots in many ways in that I have not been able to find any information on growing beets from beets. However, you can grow beet greens and they're very tasty and very nutritious. Now, to regrow beet greens, all you need to do is take off the top, no, like the top third of your beet and then save all of this beautiful beet for eating. And then you can remove some of these stems that are less than looking too nice if they're already starting to soften up a bit because they're all going to start to degrade. But what you want to do then is just, I see a little sprout already starting here and there's some already sprouting in the middle, but you just go ahead and submerge that in a little bit of water and then just put this in a nice, warm, sunny location and you're going to start to see the new beet greens growing and you can get ready to put them in your garden. Well, the next thing that I think is so fun to grow and technically not a vegetable, but that's herbs. And these are very easy to regrow from cuttings, specifically things like basil and thyme and cilantro. These can all be grown from cuttings. Now, I want to share with you to keep this in mind. If you do grow your own basil, mine's a little wilted, it's been on the counter for a while, but if you grow your own basil, you don't necessarily need to grow any from cuttings. And the reason is when your basil starts to flower, and those of you who are experienced gardeners, you already know this, but if you're new to gardening, when your basil starts to flower, it's then going to create little tiny black seeds. And you can do one of two things. You can either collect those seeds and then plant them where you want to plant them the following year, or you can just do like often what I do and just take my hand and just sort of rub the flower that's dried up now and where the seeds are and just let the basil self seed and regrow right where it is. And so that's a wonderful way that you can just keep continually having a wonderful harvest of basil. Now, if for any reason, say you bought some basil from the grocery store and you've just got some pieces, but they do have stems on them, what you want to do is just take some of the basil that still has the stem intact and just put it in some water and just monitor it and change the water every couple of days. And you will start to see that it's going to start to create roots. And once it has a significant amount of roots, you can go ahead and plant it in some potting soil. I recommend starting in a little pot with some real nice potting soil until you can create a nice hardy plant. And then that plant will flower and then you'll have basil seeds and you really can just keep growing basil continually and you won't need to buy basil anymore. And this is some thyme, some fresh thyme from my garden. And this is very easy to get to root and then go ahead and plant it in some potting soil, maybe in a little pot and then eventually in your garden. And all you want to do is just take a cutting and then just remove some of the lower leaves. And then we're just going to go ahead and put this in a glass with some water and just wait until it sprouts or until it roots. Now I'm going to let all these root and sprout and then we're going to fast forward two weeks ahead. We'll fast forward two weeks and here we are now with our kitchen scraps and how they've grown. And I'm going to go over each one with you and then we'll talk about what the next step is. But I wanted to mention something about the sweet potato because I didn't really talk a lot about this in the first part of the video. And the reason is growing sweet potatoes from an existing sweet potato is a two-step process where you allow the vines to kind of grow out of the sweet potato. Then you cut them, then you put them in water, let them root. And then once they root, then you plant them in soil. So a little more involved. So in the future, I want to do a separate video on showing you how to do this. Now, what I want to do is go over all of these that we were waiting to root and allow some of the foliage to grow up so that you can see exactly what you should be looking for after about a week or two. Now, the ginger and the potatoes, you don't need to worry about because what we covered in the first part of the video two weeks ago is basically, they don't require much preparation before going into the soil. These though have been allowed basically to root and to grow a little foliage on top before getting ready to go into the soil. And the first I want to show you is the cabbage. And this is really in no particular order as I did maybe, they may not be in the same order as the earlier part of the video, but we will cover them all. And I took some closeup pictures so that you can see how the roots are starting to develop off of the cabbage and how you're getting some little bits of sprouts here, sprouts is the right word, the little bits of the cabbage starting to grow up out of this cutting. So that's ready to go into the soil. And the next one is the fennel. Now, don't worry if you start to see some of the original cutting brown and begin to deteriorate, that's fine. You can pull this back when you go to actually plant this, or you can just plant it as is. And it'll basically, as I said, just sort of be like a cold compost. But look at this, how beautiful this fennel is starting to grow up. Who would have thought, you know, just from this cutting. And then over here, we've got the bok choy, which is just doing lovely. And then again, the same thing. You can see some of them are just going to come off very easily. You can pull, and always be very careful though. You want to be very careful of your new little plant that's growing up. But basically, that's it. Now, plants like this, there's some rooting, but there's not a lot. You're also going to notice this with the celery. There's not a ton of rooting, but you are going to see a lot of nice greenery. And then again, boom, this is going to go right into the soil. Next, what I've got here is the garlic. And look at these roots. This is just magnificent. And look at this beautiful greenery coming up here. And again, we can just go ahead and plant that as is. And we're going to get some nice garlic. And then here, we've got our carrots. And again, you know, we're not growing carrots, but we are going to grow some beautiful carrot greens. Look at how lovely, just in water. So, you know, that's going to be delightful once it gets into the soil. Now, this is, I don't have the basil, but I do have the thyme here. And this is just starting to get some roots. Some of your herbs, when you put them in water and you're waiting for them to root, it can be somewhat of a slow process, but this is starting to get some nice little roots here. So, I'm just going to continue to let that root and get the roots a little more hardy before I actually plant that one. Now, let's go over to this side. I love the fact of how these green onions or scallions, you may know them as, grow. Look at this beautiful root system that started. And look at this. This is what I was talking about earlier in the video, that you can just literally put these in water and then grow these beautiful green onions. You can clip this right now and cook with this. So, that's wonderful. But you put this in the ground, you're just going to continue to have a wonderful perpetual supply of green onions. Whenever you get some, don't discard the little bottoms, just root them like this. Then here, we've got the celery. In many ways, this is kind of similar to the bok choy. There's really not much rooting. You're not going to see a lot of rooting on the bottom, but you're going to see this lovely greenery start to come up. And you're going to see that there's actually some little baby celery that's growing. And again, if you want, these are on pretty tightly and they're not in any way rotting. So, you can go ahead and just put it right in like that. Again, you want to be conscious and careful of the new plant that is growing. And then we'll jump ahead to our leek. Look at this leek. It's doing so well. And again, just a gorgeous root system. And you're getting some beautiful greenery on top. This is ready to go into the soil. And then over here is our beet. Now, what I recommend with this, you'll see, I'll hold this up. And I've got a close-up pictures, I think, of all of these that I'll be overlaying. We've got some beautiful beet greens starting to root and starting to sprout here. And it just looks glorious. And what I'm going to do before I actually go ahead and plant this is just remove some of this dead debris that's on top there, just because it makes it, I'm going to be very careful when I do this though, because I don't want to in any way damage the beautiful new beet greens that are growing up. But I also want to make sure that I give plenty of room for sun and room for these beet greens to grow. So that's all I would do with that. But this again, we're ready to put that in. Beautiful. Now here, I've got some lettuces. I've actually added to this from what you saw originally, because we've been eating salads and so I've been saving them all. But this is the original one. Again, like the celery, like the bok choy, you're not going to see a lot of rooting initially, but look at this beautiful greenery that's grown up, some baby lettuces. This is delightful. And again, ready to go into the soil. Now this is my onion and it's going a lot slower, but it's got some lovely root systems growing here. And you're seeing right now, I'm going to do a closeup. I hope that you can see it. It's just starting to grow some little bits of green that are coming up. When you go ahead and plant this, you do want to be careful. You're probably going to want to maybe cut back some of the outer onion that's decomposing and just focus on these new little, don't you call them buds? But these new little rounds that are starting to emerge. So that's quite nice too. Now, in the coming weeks ahead, I've got another video coming out where I take you into my garden and we plant all of these. But in the meantime, I hope you'll start growing your own vegetables from scraps. And if you do have things in your kitchen that can't be regrown for a recurring harvest, be sure to check out this playlist over here where I show you how to cook with scraps because I know all of us in this traditional foods cooking community don't like to waste anything. And I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen. Love and God bless.