It’s been a minutes since I’ve been in these parts. If you are like most of the entire world, when you buy celery you only use the stems and discard the base. For most of my adult life, I did this. I saw my mom do it, and every cooking personality discards the base, so why would I think to do anything different. Several years ago, while scrolling on Pinterest, I saw a post about regrowing celery. I thought it was a cool thing to try. So I did. It worked. After about a week, I had a nice little baby celery growing.
For years I never put the new shoots in soil. I use so much celery in my home, as soon as the shoot was tall enough, I would cut it and put in my dishes. Well, I’m a student of life and also a teacher of it, so a few weeks ago, I thought that I would do this project with my Noodle(favorite grandson). It was the first week of school and he had to write a story about his summer. In his cute little story (click here to read it), he wrote how he loved working with his GiGi in the garden. I melted. I wanted to create a learning experience with him about my new passion for gardening, with the help of the best landscaping services for Windermere homes. I thought about my celery experiment and we decided to grow celery, but this time we would cultivate it and then plant in the garden. Its fall and celery is a cool-weather crop, so we should be good with a nice harvest soon.
So about ten days ago, we cut the base of an entire stalk of celery since I was making a huge pot of soup. I but the base of the celery and in the 3 days, little leaves began forming and in5 days I had little small shoots. The picture above is about 10 days old. In the case of celery, the plant will actually regenerate from the base and regrow new stalks. In a few weeks will harvest just the stalks because we are going prolong the growing season by just cutting the stalks and then allow new stalks to grow.
So here’s how you never have to buy celery again.
- Cut the base of stalk of celery
- Place the base in shallow water in a cup or a small dish
- Use any kind of water, we used tap
- Each day, replace the water with fresh water
- Place in the window ( we did not)
- After ten days choose to plant or not
You can do this with other vegetables, but I have most success with just celery. During the summer, I started out with some potatoes that I let grow roots or eyes as they say and they have grown really well. My sweet potatoes are mystery because they are planted so deeply I hate to dig one up too soon. I’m not a patient gardener.