- Good day, I'm Mark
from Self Sufficient Me and three months ago, I planted a bunch of different kitchen scraps that I salvaged from the kitchen. Instead of throwing them in the compost, I thought, let's plant them out and see if we can grow anything. And in this video, I'm
gonna show you the results. Let's get into it. (gentle music) Now, before I'll get into what I planted, let's just do a bit of background. You might've seen on YouTube, there's plenty of viral
videos going around on growing things like garlic,
onions, celery, lettuce, putting two glasses and left to shoot. People think that, wow,
that's just amazing. A lot of the time though, it's gimmicky. The simple fact is you
just can't sustain a plant with water only in a glass, in the kitchen or on a kitchen bench in doors. It will grow for a little while, but then it will pitter out. Honestly, if you're
serious about regrowing any type of vegetable from kitchen scraps, whether it be something you've salvaged from supermarket produce
that you've brought, or even from your own garden, you really should be planting
it back out in an environment where it could get the
best chance of regrowing, somewhere liking a garden
bed or hydroponically, if you've got a good hydroponic setup that you can deliver
nutrients to that plant. So what kitchen scraps
did I end up planting here in the garden? Well, I selected ones
that were fairly common. I planted a cabbage with
the base cutoff it obviously because we ate the top, a lettuce base, a celery base, an onion that had sprouted and also an onion base
and several carrot bases. Plus I cut the base off a tomato and buried that into the garden as well as a potato that had gone green. And I buried that, wrist
deep in the bed right here. So what we're going to do is go through and see how they all went. At the six week mark, I revisited this bed and I have to admit to a problem I had was I underestimated the
space that would be needed. I didn't realize the potato plant here would grow so big and
shade out so many things. And I didn't wanna waste
that half of the bed, so I planted potatoes in on that side that was separate to this experiment and they started to encroach over. And I had to fix that up and try to pull these potato plants
away, they grew so well, that was just about
taking over the whole bed. So that did impact on
the experiment somewhat. So keep that in mind as
we go through this, okay. It's been seven weeks since I planted these kitchen scraps to
see how they would grow. And as you can see, it's hard to see, this potato that I planted
has absolutely taken over a quarter at least of this
round rose garden bed. We all say planted a lettuce
and have a I look at it. It's massive, it's got a
couple of couple of heads. So it hasn't just grown back one head, it's grown several kind of heads, one, two, about three, four. Which is interesting in itself. And the celery it's not growing back nice and big with big stalks, but it's small stalks nevertheless, and the onion, that has grown
several healthy looking stalks out the top and the half
an onion that I've just cut the base off and planted is
starting to sprout as well. That carrots, they've sprouted. They're not doing as good as I expected. It's probably because
they've been shaded out. The tomato hasn't sprouted at all. I've got a suspicion that
that tomato is sterile, but anyway, let's have a
taste of some of these, especially the lettuce and the celery and see if they taste okay. 'Cause it's one thing to grow really well, it's another thing to be edible. Check it out, let's try
a tender young one first, Pretty good that's nice, nice and sweet, that's a cos that I know. Let's try some of the older leaves. Not as tender, I think
better, almost sweeter. Let's try the celery, let's
just break off a little piece. Just taste the stem first. Yeah, tastes like celery to me. It's the stems that I like to cut up, have in soups and that type of thing, leaves are a bit bitter, but nevertheless, it is growing back. We'll keep this experiment
going and see how it turns out. The onions, I don't know if we'll get much out of that base of the onion, but the old onion here
that was already sprouting. It's probably got a way to go. But if I was just
harvesting it for the tops, which you could do,
let's just break one off and have a taste. It's a very strong, oniony smell. About a nice, sweet, strong onion smell. So you imagine that chopped up, sprinkled on some roasted
potatoes or something like that. Well that's nice, it's not spring onion. Nevertheless, I like it, really nice. So have you ever growing
it just for the tops, it's worth it. I am gonna harvest more of this cos, just 'cause just because, why not? (crunching) we'll have that for din dins. So that was after seven weeks of planting and you could see that it's
changed considerably since then, several weeks on from that now. The potato plant has died back. The lettuce has gone to seed. The celery has gone considerably bigger and the onions are starting
to probably go to seed too. I might as well start now
from the front of the bed and work backwards. You can see the end of
this potato crop here. There's several on top of the surface. There's a whole heap of
beetles in here as well. I wonder if they're
feeding on the potatoes, see all the beetles. It's almost like compost beetles. Little, rolly, polly things. Anyway, this is a nice size one. There you go, the beetles are starting to eat the potato, I'm leaving
in there a bit too long. Anyway, that's not the regrowing fault. That's my fault of leaving it out too long and not harvesting. Let's give this a bit of a dig out. Cool, that's good. Another big one, one potato
is all that I've planted and we're getting quite,
there's another nice sized one. We're getting quite a good harvest here. There's some more smaller ones. So there you go, from that one potato, we got seven good sized potatoes back, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You know, seven or eight if you count all these little ones together. And we would've had
more if it wasn't for me leaving it into long and letting the bugs start to get at the ice potatoes there. So we lost two out of that. I think that's a really good result. You know, remember, this is
turning a supermarket potato that had gone green, into an organically grown, pesticide-free bunch of potatoes, probably
worth about five or so dollars, but it's not the money,
it's not just the money. It's the health, it's the regrowing. It's the less waste,
it's the rejuvenation. It's all those things put together. It's the exercise, it's
being out into the garden. It's experimentation, it's fun. So there's a lot of
things grouped together. And it's a talking point
at the kitchen table when you're cooking these fellows up and you're having something to eat, whether it be friends
that would just family, you know what I mean? This lettuce here has done its job. Yes, there are flowers
here that I could keep, but I've got plenty of other lettuce in our garden flowering now at the moment. And I've got plenty of lettuce seed. This is a great demonstration
of what you can do though. And because lettuce is true to type, you can keep the seeds
and you can have lettuce year after year or sometimes all year, depending on where you live. So let's get rid of this
latest plant though, 'cause I want you to look
at the rest of this bed. What I forgot to mention in a row here is the cabbage that I planted. This is something that didn't work. I'm a bit perplexed. It seemed to have rotted
out pretty quickly. And I can't find a sign
of that head of cabbage. I don't know, maybe a possum or cockatoo came and stole it on me or something, but it just kind of disappeared. It probably just rotted out,
but I've got a backup plan of a cabbage that I just
knocked the head off. And it's not the same. It's not a kitchen scrap that I've planted back out, I know, but it does give you an
indication of if you can get that base of the cabbage growing, you can have a secondary crop out of it. To give you an idea, let's have a look over here in the other garden bed. About eight weeks ago,
I harvested one cabbage from this plant here
and now we have three. These won't get any bigger. So I'm gonna harvest them now anyway, and we'll see what's underneath. That's a good head of cabbage. That's the first one, second one. Something's very interesting here. And the third one, which is pretty small, but still, I mean, it looks like a brussel sprout, a big one. Underneath here, you can
see how it's regenerated. In fact, there's two more heads
that probably won't develop. These are mini cabbages anyway, they're not full-sized cabbages. So if you're thinking,
they're not very big, they're meant to be small. There are mini variety
of cabbage, but yeah, in this case, it didn't work
out for me, but it can work. So trust me when I say that. So let's talk about the carrots
that I had planted here. The carrots grew out
okay for a little while. And again, it's one of these things where I never expected those
carrots to grow new bases. That just won't happen. That's a myth, and if people tell you that on the interwebs that you can grow a new carrot root out
of a scrap of carrot, well, that's just not true. But what you can grow is
the tops and those tops can turn into seeds and then you can sew and get carrots. So that's what I was trying to do there, but because of those
crops growing so well, they smothered that the carrots
and the carrots lost energy and eventually they died
back, but you get the gist. If you were going to
plant them for the seeds. Well, that could work quite well. Let's move across now to the onion. I planted one full
onion that had sprouted. That's a common thing in the kitchen. You have an onion that
gets old and it sprouts. What can you do with it? Well, you can plant them out. Now again, I haven't had a heck of a lot of success with this one here. Earlier on, it grew quite well, but now let's just pull it
out, have a look at that. See how that's all separated. See that like almost like a garlic clove, those bulbs can get a lot bigger, when you plant one of those, especially those brown onion
varieties that have sprouted, what can often happen is
they grow like a shallot. This could expand out
eight inches or so more. And by the end, I planted this a bit late in the season and that's probably why, and it's just getting too hot now. But if I would have planted them earlier, well then I think I would've got a much better result out of it. Now, the celery. Here's another one that
actually surprised me a bit. It grew very well. (crunching) Not bad, the stalks aren't as huge as what they were from the supermarket, but it still grew back good enough. This is totally edible. Totally good for cooking
soups or whatever, you know, celery sticks and it's
worked, it's actually worked. Look at the root ball. Hikey, crikey. I mean, it must be as hardy as
anything growing this stuff. Again, this is another keeper
and it will continue to grow. Or it would have if I didn't pull it out for scientific purposes, of course, I'm gonna cut this off
and we'll take it inside and we'll eat it. But yeah, fantastic. There's so many things
you can do with this that was once I small kitchen scrap, that was gonna go to the
chickens or the compost, but instead now is a
fully ground plant again that's totally used back into the kitchen. And the last thing I wanted to talk about is this tomato here,
planted it right there. So it should be here somewhere. It's probably completely
composted down now and eaten by worms. No, I didn't bury it that deep. Yeah, it's gone, absolutely gone. Well it either just never
made it, this tomato, because it might've been just rotted down and the seeds didn't make it. Or the tomato was sterile because often, the ones that they get
at the store are sterile. Or if you do get to grow them, they're not true to type anyway. And there are crossbred
and the plant that you get might be pretty ordinary and
not very good for disease. And it's probably just rotted
away or any little seedlings that sprouted probably
couldn't make their way through for some reason. But sometimes you do
get some great successes from supermarket tomatoes in the garden. And obviously, if they
are heirloom tomatoes from the supermarket,
you usually can grow them quite well into the garden
and they're true to type. Overall, I'm pretty
happy with these results. And I'm glad that I was able
to show you what can happen when you plant kitchen scraps
into the garden like this. I thought it was an
interesting experiment to try and I hope you found it interesting. If you did make sure you give
it a big regrow thumbs up, regrow that thumb. It was half a thumb, it
was the base of the thumb. And then you regrew it to a big thumbs up, and share the video around. Sharing this video around
would help me out heaps, sharing and thumbs upping
really helps the channel out. So it's very important
as too, is subscribing. I'm nearly up to my mil for subscribers. It'd be great to punch over that soon. Well, thank you so much
for watching, bye for now. Yeah, no, happy with it. Happy with it, would I
like the tomatoes to grow? That was the vision, would I have liked the carrots to get to seed? That was the vision, but it
gives you an idea anyway. Yeah, yeah worth an experiment, but that's gardening. Like I said, it doesn't always go to plan, but you gotta show the
good and the bad, cheers.
I love this dudeβs energy! ππ Iβm surprised everything worked out as well as it did, especially the lettuce.
I've been cultivating soil in a few garden beds with vegetable scraps straight mixed in due to a lack of a proper compost bin. I've ended up with a few surprise pumpkin, potato and celery plants so far.
Veggie scraps are the best!
Save your seeds, folks. And root veggies too.
the folks over at r/gardening might like this
Isn't this actually really bad for crops?
I remember seeing somewhere that planting plants from plants sold as food had a tendency to start plant viruses and blights.
I might be wrong, but make sure to research it before planting food scraps. This might be against the spirit of the subreddit (I'm not subscribed and just randomly found this post) but seed potatoes are cheap and don't really create any waste that a normal potato wouldn't; once you have a crop you can make more seed potatoes.