There’s all sorts of growing experiments you can do with your kids just by using food from your kitchen. The possibilities are nearly limitless…take some time to take stalk of the food supplies you have, and decide which ones you’d like to experiment with. To give you an idea of the kinds of things you can plant, here’s a quick list:
1. Whole seed spices (like corriander seed, mustard seed, etc.)
2. Seeds from fruits and vegetables (like potatoes, green peppers, apples, etc.)
3. Snack food seeds (like popcorn and raw nuts, etc.)
4. Fresh herbs and spices (like garlic and ginger root, etc.)
Most of these seeds and roots will grow best by starting them in water. Also, many of them can be transplanted out into the garden, if you’d like.
Here’s an example of a couple of ways to get some food growing from your kitchen food supply:
Celery
Take a bunch of celery and cut the bottom root off. Place the root in a cup, filled about half way up the root. New leaves and stalks will begin to form out the top of the cut root. You can then plant it in the garden if you’d like.
Potato:
Keep a potato around until some eyes start growing on it. Slice a piece of the potato off where the eye is, and put it in a cup with water covering the potato, but not the eye. Soon, you’ll have a potato plant sprouting up and you can plant it in the garden, or just watch it grow in the cup (no potatoes will grow in the cup, but the plant will grow and look good.)
If you’re really interested in this kind of kitchen food experimentation, you’ll be happy to know about a great book on the subject called Grow it, Don’t Throw It!: 68 Windowsill Plants from Kitchen Scraps by Deborah Peterson. She walks you through all the specifics of growing 68 different things from your kitchen supplies. The book is packed with tons of helpful information! (And it’s lots of fun, too!)