Six Food Scraps You Can Regrow in Your Kitchen and Garden

Organic romaine hearts, 3 days.

Leftovers can be handy for creating new meals and feeding hungry chickens, but if you've ever had carrots sprout little roots in the crisper tray, you've witnessed the greatest thing about fresh food: it can grow MORE fresh food.

Imagine my excitement when I found out there was a book called, “Don't Throw It, Grow It!, ” that was all about growing food from your kitchen scraps! Sadly, I checked out the book from my local library and quickly realized that it wasn't about growing food at all. It was about growing pretty plants from your food scraps, and it was geared toward people living in apartments who didn't have the money to buy house plants. I'm not opposed to sprouting a sweet potato vine, but for my purposes of stretching our food budget, I wouldn't keep that vine in a pot on a windowsill. Plant that same sweet potato in a tire, bury all but six inches of the vine as it grows (by stacking tires and adding soil), and by the first hard freeze next year you have 20 pounds of sweet potatoes in a tire tower. Now, that's a recycling plan I can get behind. Other food scraps that can turn into food are:

1. Onion root ends, including green onions or scallions. Chop the onion, plant the roots and keep moist. You will grow another. Whole. Onion. I kid you not.
2. Carrot tops. Carrots produce seed in their second year, so grow your own carrot seed by planting the tops of carrots (usually sold at a year old) and sprouting the greens. The carrots you use must be non-hybrid/open-pollenated to guarantee seed production. Try organic.
3. Lettuce and greens. Put the root ends of romaine lettuce, celery hearts, turnips and beets in a glass full of water. Grow a salad in your windowsill.
4. Kiwi vines. Kiwi is a tropical fruit and likes it hot, with some watering to help it along. The vine grows FAST, and you need a few to guarantee you get a male and female so they produce fruit (technically, berries). Plant a slice of kiwi in a pot of soil, keep it moist and wait for seedlings.
5. Sprouted garlic cloves. Plant a clove of garlic in the early spring or fall, and in a few months you've got a whole head of garlic! Talk about return on investment.
6. Sprouted potatoes. Now's the time to cut those sprouted potatoes up, roll them around in some wood ashes to prevent rot, and put them in the ground, sprout facing up. Read up on growing potatoes, because you'll be doing it!

There are lots of other fruits and veggies you can plant, and some I won't try because they won't produce anything usable. Avocado pits may grow into nice trees, but they won't produce fruit north of Brownsville, Texas, unless they're in a 40-foot-tall greenhouse. My parents are currently growing teeny orange trees from seeds that sprouted in old fruit, but since most citrus and apples are grafted, these little trees may not grow true fruit. Only time will tell. The moral is, keep a stack of small paper or plastic cups and a bin of potting soil near your cutting board, and plant those scraps to see what grows. Then tell me so I can copy you and share with the class, m'kay?

Starting a price book means never having to head-slap yourself for paying too much

A price book is a notebook you organize to suit your shopping habits, in which you record a product's price per ounce (or serving, if you prefer), the brand, size of the container, store name and date. A cold cereal category might look like this:

Brand Name	Package Size	Store	Date	Price per Oz
HCF Corn Flakes	18 oz	East Side Grocery	04/06/12	0.087

(If using software to make your price book, I just realized you need to set your number format to text so it won't automatically round your price per ounce to the nearest penny.)

When you're first starting a price book, I recommend going to the store without children, if at ALL possible. At least for me, when there's math involved, it must have my undivided attention if it's going to be anywhere close to accurate. Use a calculator to figure price per ounce or serving; don't trust the handy-dandy price per ounce on the shelf tag that some stores provide. That number is sometimes wrong, so figure it yourself.

Calculate the prices of everything in a certain category that you are sure your family will eat, and then decide on a maximum price per unit (price point) you're willing to pay. For cold cereal, I don't pay more than 11 cents an ounce. Don't assume that larger quantities (such as huge bags of cereal) are cheaper; that's what manufacturers want you to assume. Those bags sometimes cost double what smaller boxes cost. What happens when I don't find cereal that is less than my highest price point? We don't have cereal.

Keeping a price book can help you track store sale cycles (usually 3 months). It can also save you time at the store if you're buying loss-leader items, because you'll know in advance if they're good buys for you. Loss-leaders are advertised sales, usually on the front and back pages of a sales circular, on which the store takes a loss. They're hoping that great deals will entice you into the store and you'll spend money on other things so they'll recoup that loss, but an ad scheme is no match for a smart shopper with a price book.

A few of my price points:

• Cereal: 11 cents an ounce
• Fresh fruit: $1 a pound
• Cabbage: 33 cents a pound
• Potatoes: 30 cents a pound (good cheap food, but “junk” food in my book)
• Ground meat: $1.50 a pound
• Bone-in meat: $1 a pound

Just a note: adjust your price points with inflation. The cost of everything has gone up about 33 percent recently, and it's only going to go higher as gas prices increase.

Can you eat on $50 a month? Sure you can, with a few lifestyle tweaks

My family of four, on average, eats for a grand total of $200 a month. Sound impossible? It's totally possible, but first you have to know what you are currently spending on groceries. I'll hold your hand, because it's pretty scary when you actually know.

The most flexible portion of any budget, after entertainment and dinners out (if those are in your budget), is groceries. When Hubs and I found ourselves suddenly living on one income, I sat down and figured out a budget that allowed $400 for groceries. I figured this was pretty close to what we were spending, but knew I needed to know for sure. I kept grocery, restaurant and fast food receipts to figure out how much it cost us to eat one month, and the grand total was staggering. We spent nearly $700 just on food. That was a number that was incompatible with our financial solvency, so we immediately:

• Cut out all food not cooked at home.
• Eliminated almost all pre-packaged foods.
• Began keeping a log of all the food we had to have, where we bought it, when, and how much it cost (per ounce).

Soon I began to notice patterns at my local grocery store. Sales repeated every three months, so I learned when to stock up. We were blessed with a small freezer at the perfect price (free), and I discovered that just after Thanksgiving, turkeys went on clearance for 59 cents a pound. That freezer holds seven large turkeys, I discovered.

Within a couple of months of finding the best prices per ounce for staple foods, following sale trends and getting back to real, homemade food instead of processed food, we cut down to $400 for our grocery spending. That's when I got creative, and shaved off another $200 a month for a sustainable average of $200 a month to feed all four of us. And that, my friends, was just the beginning.

What is Aeropostale, and why should I care?

First off, let me say that I'm just a regular person and the ideas I have aren't new.

Are you still here? Hellooo?

You see, I've been living this super-tightwad life for several years now, constantly finding new ways to pinch pennies, falling off the wagon and getting back on again. And, I keep learning stuff and living this life and, while it's old hat to me now, every time I open my mouth about the things I do to save money, people act like I've just invented this cool new widget that I must share. Huh.

I started looking into it because I didn't think it needed to be done. I figured all this stuff was covered, what with all the frugal, thrifty coupon sites out there. Heck, I was subscribed to a lot of them. But, as I found myself unsubscribing from the blogs and sites that hawked coupons and ways to save $10 at Aeropostale (what?), I realized that maybe I did have something to offer.

This is not a site for the faint of heart, although if you think you can't do the stuff I do to live the life you want, you might just surprise yourself. I haven't worked outside our home since 2007. On a teacher's salary, we've bought a house with land in the country. We are well on our way to being debt-free, we're healthier than we've ever been, and I have lots of pretty little chickens and two happy country boys to show for it. And, I've gotten to live my dream and raise my kids. That's the most valuable part to me, and who knew I could get there by changing my attitude and washing some Ziplocs? You can, too. Follow me to some sheer tightwad awesomeness...