Although I buy seeds for most of my vegetable gardening, here are two foods that I'm growing for free this year. This is truly free food. I use parts of foods that I've purchased in spring that are deemed waste, such as inedible seeds or root ends. I plant these bits into ordinary garden or yard soil mixed with home-made compost.
Green Onions
As I've been using grocery store green onions this spring, I've cut off about 1 inch of the root end and popped that part into some soil in a planter just outside the kitchen door. I didn't do anything special with the onion ends, just made sure the roots were intact and there was enough of the onion part (about 1 inch) to regrow. I can now see they are beginning to push up some new green growth from the root ends. I hope to have green onions for cutting in about a month.
Some folks prefer to start their green onion ends in water. I've had success planting directly into soil, provided it's kept watered (not a problem in our rainy spring weather) and likelihood of frost has passed.
What I like about growing green onions from the root end of purchased onions is that I would have otherwise just composted that root end. So I'm using a part that is basically a waste product from the green onions. In addition, you can begin harvesting from these green onions that were grown from roots in about 6 weeks after planting. Which means, I can be planting onion roots way up until early August and still have time to harvest some green tops before our weather changes in fall.
Bell Peppers
I have 6 pots of bell peppers (2 plants per pot) that I started from the seeds from a grocery store red bell pepper. As many of my neighbors do, I'm growing these plants in black pots in a very sunny spot of our yard. The seeds were free. We had the pots already. And the soil is a mixture of the soil from our yard and home-made compost. My experience with growing peppers from saved seeds from grocery store red peppers has been fair in the past. At the lesser end of harvest, I've gotten 1 or 2 small green peppers per plant. At the greater end, I've harvested 2 medium green to red peppers per plant. In all cases, the plants have been free, and I've grown them in soil from our yard/garden. If I get just one pepper from each plant, that will still be 12 free peppers for our meals or adding to homemade pickle relish.
What I like about growing peppers from the seeds collected from store-bought red peppers is this is totally free. I don't use the pepper seeds for any cooking purpose. I would otherwise add the seeds to the compost. And since it's a totally free endeavor, I'm willing to take a chance on the plants not producing as well as if I'd purchased seeds that were designed for my area. Because this is what I'd call risky gardening, I am unwilling to use purchased soil for these pots. But I will give them several drinks of my free compost tea this summer. Keeping my fingers crossed that this is one of the better years for my peppers.
