Don’t throw away that celery or romaine lettuce base!
Instead, keep two inches of the base and plop it into water. When the water gets slimy, dump the water and add new. Keep doing this until you have leaves forming.
Ready to plant? Bury up to the base of the new sprout (the top of the old base). You don’t necessarily need roots forming. They’re already doing it inside the old base. Also, you don’t need to amend the soil. We just put them in native soil where we keep wildflowers, and they do fine.
Harvest throughout a mild winter. When romaine bolts in the summer, let it go to seed and scatter the seeds. If you’re lucky, the seeds will form new plants!
This likely works for other plants. Experiment and let us know if you were successful with something else!
by Paul Thomas, ECMG intern