Thursday 10 May 2012

Regrowing Celery

As a home educating family, we usually have many experiments on the go at any one time and I am really excited to show you this one of mine. I am a huge fan of raw food especially salad and we also love to grow our own food. Having recently read many articles about regrowing celery from the stub part that is usually thrown away, I decided to give it a try.... lured by the thought of free food. Each week I cut the bottom off the celery and put it in a bowl of water.


Some people just kept it in water for one night then planted it in the garden but we were curious to see the new growth and growing celery in England is a bit of a challenge, from what I have read, as it is not at all frost hardy and shouldn't be planted out until May or June. As you can see the celery just continued to grow.


In the photograph above I have arranged the celery in age order so you can clearly see the growth, there is about a week or two between each stump. You can see on the second plant from the left a new root is forming at the base.


The new celery plant continues to grow from the center, some of the outside stalk does die back but is easy to peel off to reveal your new plant.


These are the two largest celery plants now, I have had them potted up for a few weeks, as it is still too early to plant out. The plants have really taken off since they were put into compost, as you can see, they have had a lot of new growth and the roots are starting to come out of the bottom of the pots. I have been getting them used to the outside temperature on nice days to harden them up ready for planting out soon.


I now have about six new celery plants, grown free from the pieces we normally throw away, we are really looking forward to harvest time as this has been quite an exciting project for the children to see. Why not have a go yourself...

8 comments:

  1. What a brilliant project - I usually freeze the ends to throw in the stock pot but this looks really fun. Cheers for taking the time to share :)

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    1. I usually use as much as possible of every vegetable too, and on some of the later stumps I'm trying to regrow I have just put the middle parts in water. It is definitely worth it, there is a lot of new growth to eat :)

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  2. What a brilliant idea! Thanks for the info :)

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  3. This is so cool! I didn't know you could do this. I want to try it!

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  4. This is amazing! Never knew you could do this, and with the amount of celery we go through, I realy wish I'd have realised this sooner! Going to try this later in the week with our current pack of celery. Thanks for sharing :)

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  5. I just showed this to my Mum and she is going to have a go too :)

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