As I have a large garden and the luxury of space, I don’t usually make time to experiment with growing food in tight spaces. But I’ve always been curious about growing food from scraps. So I made the time – thank you curiosity.

I saved some scraps from going straight into the compost bin and worm farm, placed them in a shallow bowl of water and left them on my sunny kitchen bench. I used carrot and celery “stubs”, but you can also use lettuce, most root crops (beetroots, swedes, turnips etc) and things like spring onions (better in a glass of water).

Within one week little leaves started to sprout and within three weeks they looked like this.

As it’s working so well I’ve since added in fresh carrot and celery stubs so you’ll see different stages of growth above and below.

The wonderful thing about this is that it doesn’t matter where you source your food (scraps) from. It could be from your organic home garden or the supermarket down the road – both will work perfectly. I’m a huge fan of finding solutions that can work for all people and this is one of them.

It’s been such a fun thing to watch. As a gardener who usually only grows in soil, this is a stunning reminder that food growing is a thing for anyone, anywhere. And it’s also just a cool way to boggle some minds – watching plants grow “from nothing” is a cool party trick, my young daughter is very impressed and I like to impress her :-).

Three weeks difference between these two carrot stubs 

Now, the other obvious good thing about this is that you can save some cash by growing your own fresh greens – which are currently pretty expensive at the shops due to extreme weather events damaging farmer’s crops. The more we can get involved in growing some of our food, the more resilient we are in times of hardship. This is possibly the easiest ways to grow food (that and sprouts) I’ve ever tried – and I’ve tried a lot!