Growing Your Groceries Update

A while back I blogged about growing your groceries.  You can read that post HERE.  Here is an update on some of things we tried to grow from the grocery store.

Lettuce

Well the lettuce works fantastic when you let it sit in water and harvest the leaves after a few weeks.  Once.  maybe twice. However, I decided to plant it in the ground just to see what it would do.  Turns out it just grows, and grows, and grows upward.  It continued to grow small leaves so I let it just keep going until it stopped producing anymore leaves and some of them fell over from the weight.  They even started budding on top and looked like pretty wild flowers!  I wanted to plant some lettuce from seed in the row they were in so I went ahead and dug them up.  I wish I would have taken a picture while they were still standing but I forgot.  Here is what they looked like and the harvest we got from them.  Unfortunately they tasted very bitter and we probably won't eat it.  Bummer!

Green Onion

Our green onions however have FAR exceeded my expectations.  We started them out in water and once they had roots a few inches long, planted them in window boxes.  We haven't bought any since! I've harvested them over and over again - at least 5 or more times each - and they keep growing!  It's an endless supply of green onion.  I'm having to find ways to cook with it to keep up!  We now have 3 boxes total and just rotate which one I cut from.

Celery

Our celery was a complete flop.  It would turn a beautiful color green and grow lots of leaves - even grow some stalks a little bit.  But ultimately it always started growing some kind of mold or fungus and then died.  I don't know if there is a trick or maybe it just doesn't work well with celery.  Either way, we were never able to harvest and eat any celery we tried to regrow.

Peppers

We love those little mini colorful peppers in yellow, orange, and red.  They don't have a lot of seeds in them but I wondered what would happen if we save them and try to grow them.  There are probably better ways to do it, but we just simply took the seeds straight from the peppers and planted them in seed starter soil in our basement.  We weren't sure if they would germinate but sure enough, in a few weeks we had foliage.  When it was time to put the rest of the plants outside, we transplanted the baby plants into a Topsy Turvy pepper planter.  While we still do not have peppers, we have lots of strong leaves and are even starting to see some buds.  Here's hoping we actually get to eat some peppers later this summer!