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?

Preserving Garden Abundance

On our little homestead, summer means it's super hot, the garden is cranking out the produce, and we're doing everything we CAN to keep up. And can, we must.

We are super lazy gardeners, so really industrious people can produce a lot more food in a 1,000-square-foot garden than we do. Still, our garden goodies combined with some excess from friends, and here's what we've added to our pantry so far (in about the last week):

• We turned about 75 pounds of cucumbers into 4 gallons of gherkins (fermented pickles, which are "cooking" in the entry closet), 7 quarts of kosher dills, 4.5 quarts of sandwich slices, 7 pints of relish and a gallon of cucumber kimchi. (About to make more of that... so awesome!)
• Our fig trees took the year off last year during the drought, so they're pumping out fruit this year at a rate of about 2-3 gallons a day. I usually make fig preserves, but I already made 7 pints with what we had in the freezer, so I'll make more of that, but I'm "branching out." I'm thinking fig syrup and rosemary-fig preserves. Now to get that goat so I can make goat cheese...
• A friend gave us a bag of assorted cayenne, banana and jalapeno peppers, so we pickled the whole peck of peppers. That made for four pints and some giggly tongue-twisters for the boys.

 All in all, it's not a bad start to the summer. Gotta get back to it now; on the menu today is zucchini and tomatoes and all... those... figs. And maybe cream-style corn. And, if anyone has creative ideas for using up figs, please let me know!

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.