How often do you have left over pieces of food, from your food preparation? Cutting veggies or fruit and discarding pieces, such as stalks, end pieces of tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries etc?
Well you don't need to just throw them away, you could re-grow them, and here is an example. (I'm performing this experiment in March, for reference)
I've taken 2 items, a strawberry and a tomato, and sliced them up. I've put a small amount of compost/soil into 2 bowls, and placed each the sliced strawberries onto the top of the soil of one bowl, and the tomatoes on to the top of the other.
I've then added a light topping of more soil and sprayed it with water to keep it from drying out, and to give, what are basically now seeds, some moisture to help give it some growing power.
Both the strawberries and tomatoes contain seeds. Even though these products have come from a supermarket, it doesn't mean that the seeds are not going to be fertile.
By giving the seeds within the fruit, soil and water, which is after all what all veggies and fruit needs, after a few days the seeds should begin to germinate, and normally within a couple of weeks, you should start to see the seedlings starting to pop up, so long as you keep the soil moist and keep the seeds somewhere warm and light, such as a window sill.
In a few weeks time, you will hopefully have lots of baby plants, and at this point you want to separate some of the stronger/larger plants and re-pot them into larger containers. Once it warms up outside you can pop the containers somewhere warm and sunny, and fingers crossed, in Summer you should expect to find tomatoes and strawberries growing, and once ripe, you can pick and enjoy.
Each plant could produce several kilo's of fruit, to enjoy, which both saves you money, gives you the freshest possible produce and is a super way to make use of food scraps! It's also a really good experiment for the kids, they will love to watch the seeds grown from scraps to flourishing plants!
You can try this with all sorts of different food items, such as raspberries, broad and runner beans, plums and even apples and pears, although expect a much longer wait for the latter, it take several years for fruit to establish, but you never know, you could end up with an orchard, just by planting a old apple core!
I will update this post later in the year, to let you know how I got on...