I’ve previously written a feature post here on Planter’s Place about growing your own veggies indoors. One of the techniques I mention is regrowing leftover veggies ends and tops and discarded seeds and pits. The goal is to essentially recreate the veggie you happen to be using in the kitchen. Wouldn’t you know, someone went ahead and wrote a book about it!

No-Waste Kitchen Gardening

That book is titled No-Waste Kitchen Gardening: Regrow Your Leftover Greens Pits, Seeds and More by author and all-round great person Katie Elzer-Peters. Katie is a long-time garden writer cohort and friend. She wrote No-Waste Kitchen Gardening as a lifestyle guide to help folks reduce waste in the kitchen by using what would otherwise go in the trash. I recently heard on the CBS This Morning show each person wastes something like 280 lbs. of food each year. Unbelievable!

Content

While my bit about growing veggies from leftovers was good information, it was really just an introduction to the concept. Katie’s book takes the topic into overdrive with information. Through her clever and clear writing, Katie shows us how to regrow and regenerate new plants from those scraps you’re about to toss in the trash or compost bin. With a little bit of know-how about what part of the vegetable you’re working with, some basic plant science concepts and a bunch of engagement on your end, whatever project you start will end with a new head of lettuce, a new melon vine or a hill of potatoes. And if it doesn’t, you’re more than likely to have been bitten by the regrowing bug and will give it another try.

Katie splits the chapters into helpful categories, including what scrap roots and underground stems to regrow in soil, what scrap stems and modified stems can grow in soil, what reclaimed seeds can be grown in soil and water and what whole plants can be grown in stems in water. It’s a helpful breakdown. The first page of each of those chapters gives you a quick look at what veggies will be discussed.

The book is honest in explaining what will work indoors and what’ll work outdoors. It also says what to do when you just can’t save every single scrap (compost it!). As I go through this winter and I begin to miss my community garden plot, I’ll pull out this book. I’ll see what scrap from my day’s meal prep I can get to regrow.

Available from Cool Springs Press (ISBN: 9780760361603).