Sustainable Gardening Tips

Everyone and their grandma is regrowing their food scraps. Now that you've got a counter full of jars with sprouting vegetables, what do you do next? It's so simple, everyone in the home will have a green thumb! 

Just like everyone else on the internet right now, my kids and I have also started re-growing our fruits and vegetables. It’s also a great way to reduce our food waste, the average household wastes 140 kilograms of food a year - that is over 300 lbs!

It’s so simple to do, and it’s such a wonderful feeling to have some fresh herbs and vegetables for meals that we’ve grown!

You want to save your vegetable scraps, vegetables like celery and lettuce are really easy to regrow. You take your scrap and place it cut side down into shallow water.It’s best to change the water everyday and don’t worry about that runny texture, that’s normal! And very slowly you’ll see greens start to appear.

But what's the next step? You can leave these growing in the water or take the next step and transplant them. We've been getting a few more deliveries than normal, so I decided why not use one of those boxes for my garden. Cardboard boxes are compostable, so I can take this whole box and plant it into the ground when I’m ready.

First you don’t want too deep a box. If you have a box with a lid, take that off, cut your box down if it is too deep. Next, decide on what you’ll be doing with this box garden. If it’s for the indoors, you will want to line it with plastic. Some reusable plastic, maybe a grocery bag or plastic bag from your packages. If this is for the outdoors, or you’re planning on planting the box directly, skip the plastic. Instead, you will poke holes in the bottom of the box with a pen.

Once you’ve lined with plastic, or poked your holes, you’re going to fill the box with potting soil and a little fertilizer. Make sure to pick vegetables that will grow in the box depth you have, I’m doing lettuce, celery, and, I am planting a few seeds.

Then, make a space in the soil for each plant, carefully place your plant in the soil and pad it in with all the soil. Now if you’re keeping your vegetable box indoors, you can trim away at it every now and them.

If you’re going to plant this in your garden, you can either plant the whole box in the garden, or cut your plant out, leaving the bottom or the sides, and plant it directly into the ground. The cardboard will breakdown over time as its all compostable.

There ya go, who knew old boxes, and left over lettuce could be so fun!