Growing veg from bits of older veg?

[JengaBlock]

Hi

Want to grow some veg with the kids but keep costs down. Read recently somewhere (pretty sure it was a link from mn as that's where I get most of them!) that you can start your veg growing from bits of your old veg.

I can't find where I read it and can't find the right google terms, so is anyone able to help?

I know I can cut out potato eyes, and have done that, but I am sure there was more. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[purpleroses]

You can grow garlic from garlic really easily. Just separate out the cloves and plant them and each one grows into a bulb. Best to do it in the autumn though - if you do it now you'll most likely end up with huge big bulbs of garlic that don't separate into cloves. (Ok if you like garlic a lot I guess )

You can plant potato eyes but they won't grow into very strong plants or produce many potatoes. But you can plant whole potatoes - best to plant them when they've started sprouting and you should get good potato plants.

Don't try planting carrots, greens, etc though - they won't grow!

[JengaBlock]

Thanks. Just ut of interest, why is the eye not as strong as the whole thing? I hadn't seen that and now wish I had bunged in the whole lot! Gr!

What about onions? I a, sure I have one sprouting in the pantry...

[purpleroses]

Because the energy in the potato is what the plant uses to grow. If you just plant an eye it doesn't grow so strong.

You can grow onions from little mini onions (onion sets) that you have to buy. If you plant whole onions I think they put their energy into flowering and the onion itself gets small and shrivelled.

Beansprouts are a good one to do with kids - you just put dried beans in a jamjar with kitchen towel and a bit of water and they grow into beansprouts.

[CuttedUpPear]

I saw this on FB on one of those bloody annoying green growing things pages where you would think they invented bloomin carrots.

The other things they had were leek tops, lettuce bottoms and ...can't remember, sorry.

Anyway I have several times had a rant at their icky pictures of plants obviously bought in mature, growing strongly in half a plastic bottle with no drainage whatsoever.

Rant over. For now.

[CuttedUpPear]

found it

[JengaBlock]

Thanks for the link. Interesting!