December 23, 2024

VIDEO: Growing a Garden from GROCERY STORE FOOD!


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22 thoughts on “VIDEO: Growing a Garden from GROCERY STORE FOOD!

  1. Hi Jess. I learned a great deal of information from you. I also grow basil and rosemary from grocery plants and have herb garden all year outside and indoors as well.

    Love your videos. Be safe!

  2. Only can speak for me & my family we've done this all our lives. Potato's, pinto beans, onions anything that grows roots or seeds and yes we've all grown food. My Mother In Law taught me to pick up broken plants & flower plants when in a box store take them home and root .

  3. YT'er Mary @ Mary's Nest Channel showed How-to Grow plants from Vegetable Scraps. I did a few and it was funny.
    I was amazed at the Celery root. It didn't grow a celery bunch, but did grow alot of the leaves that had a super strong celery taste & smell. It was great flavoring for soups & stews.

  4. A lot of the “won’t grow” is based on not understanding mega farms.

    With potatoes the “won’t produce” is a misconception based on type. Store bought potatoes – I have found over and over are determinate (they grow fast and fewer potatoes, so the older timers would say they were tainted with something) seed potatoes on the other hand are most often indeterminate and grow slow and big and plentiful. Mega farms need a one-time harvest so they go for short season all ready at once and get a new crop in the ground.

    Garlic I have never had an issue with (except the first year). Everyone I have helped with garlic issues were planting them in the spring. Beautiful shoots, no bulbs. Garlic needs the cooler months to start cloves then the warmup period to grow larger. I also find people cook the big cloves and plant the small ones. You get what you plant. Smaller cloves smaller bulbs.

    Beans and tomatoes are the same as potatoes (usually). I’ve found most basic grocery stores have determinate varieties. For production all at once. – I have found most store beans are runners/pole beans. The farms use this so they sprawl out into the alleys of the fields. Pesticides and fertilizers are crop dusted and they get maximum yield from space. – by leaving the beans growing, I have found I can get 2 or 3 harvests – but the pods are still all coming at the same time. No going out and getting enough for a meal whenever you want.
    -I got a great tip to grow my store beans for dry beans and seed beans for continual harvest.

    One store seed I do love that was not included is peach. I buy local peaches, clean the pit, crack the shell and toss the tiny seed in soil ziplock and toss in back of fridge. After a couple months you will see roots, pot, harden off, then transplant. Love my peach trees.

    Hope those help someone

  5. Yep, I grow tons of stuff from the grocery store: potatoes, garlic, squashes, various cuttings, tomatoes, fruit seeds. I have not had fruits yet from fruit seeds. But I have had a papaya grove from grocery store papaya and all my potatoes, garlic, kabocha last year came from ones I bought from the market. My first bitter melons came from seeds of a market bitter melon. I have grown beans from market beans. I still do sprouts from bags of market mung beans. I have grown chia and celery from market chia and celery seeds also. Yep, peppers also. I collect seeds from seed pods I see on walks around the neighborhood too. Ah, also cuttings, such as from rosemary. Also, some seeds will mature in green fruit or often are viable. I find viable pepper seeds and tomato seeds from market tomatoes and peppers. My bitter melon started from a green bitter melon. Let it sit on the counter and it will turn yellow. Or just try some of the seeds. If they are hard, generally it's worth trying. My ginger and tumeric are from market ones. They did great this past year. Still have lots in the ground. All my green onions are from supermarket green onions. Some of my brassicas are from supermarket brassicas – just bury at least 1 joint of the stem. You will get leaves to eat and flowers. Those flowers will produce seeds, yada. (Haha I keep editing because I keep remembering more of my plants that started life as supermarket embryos)

    For potatoes and sweet potatoes, you can just bury the whole thing or pieces of it in the ground. Sweet potato slips are more reliable to grow if you bury the potato in shallow soil, either fully covered or 1/2 covered. Water worked for me also, but I find the soil method much more reliable and algae/mosquito free. Use very lose soil or compost so you can wiggle the slips off the main potato and plant it where you want. Also, any sweet potato vine can be cut off and rooted – either in water or soil. Also remember the sweet potato plant itself is a fantastic vegetable.

  6. Hi Jess, I’ve grown celery from store brought celery. I leave about an inch and a half of the stalk, placing the bottom in a jar of water, and putting it in a sunny window. A few weeks later ,transferred it to my garden. And it was just as good as the one I brought from the store.

  7. This was so informative and helpful to a newbie! I started with some herbs last summer some won some didn't make it! But I am educating myself this winter to try for more variety this year! Thanks jess!

  8. I doubt you’ll see this 9 days later but what do you know about winter sowing? I guess I can put out certain seeds in milk jugs and other containers and let them set out in the snow in zone 5 until they germinate. Like echinacea and other flowers.

  9. I had a massive crop of mini sweet peppers…green, yellow and orange peppers last summer from a bag from the grocery. Oddly, no reds grew, only orange and green. Maybe the pH? Not sure why, but they were prolific from a single bag.

  10. Thank you!!! I hadn't thought about the spice section and the seeds there. And the popcorn! It hadn't even occurred to me before. It's nice to know that no matter what, I can still produce food for my home with whatever I've got. It's a level of inner peace and hope that things will be ok. I appreciate the lesson today. 🙂

  11. There once was a coarse cross-pollinator…

    This should be considered a Prepping video. One thing I always advocate is, when the shizzy hits the fizzy (if the electric grid goes down, for example), preparedness-minded folks can run out to the nearest store and obtain big bags full of produce. (Bring cash and a calculator… but if all else fails, remember "By Any Means Necessary" is the order of the day in an Emergency.) Run around the store and grab everything that contains seeds… then grab everything in seed form… except for nuts, unless you want to eat them – growing nuts is a long-term project. WHILE YOU'RE AT IT… make sure you grab a bunch of buckets at the back of the store. (If you don't have land, you'll need lots of containers!) Next run to the big box hardware store and grab bags of potting soil or compost. Good Prepper, you get a cookie.

    Jess, please let me know how well that honeynut squash seed grows for you. I have a bunch of those seeds in my back porch waiting to be planted. I want to know if it'll be worth it. I'm looking forward to seeing you plant those.

    So… on the subject of corn. Lots of popcorn can also be used as meal corn, like making corn meal for cornbread or finely ground corn flour (masa harina) for making tortillas or for empanadas and the like. And yeah, if you plant them, they will grow. As for other types of corn, I've been thinking of going to the Tractor Supply and other feed stores to obtain large bags of feed corn. If you can get organic feed corn and it's not all cracked and broken… I just bet you can plant that corn and grow more from it. It might not be silver queen super-sweet corn… but feed corn has to be pretty sweet to fatten up those cattle (just sayin), which means you might actually get some kind of decent crop of corn from it. That's my theory.
    (I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried this; Did the corn grow and was it any good to eat?)

    On the subject of Basil: I bought a couple of those potted basil plants from my local Trader Joe's. I prepared a lovely pot of soil and popped those basil plants out of the little pots… and I found the plants rooted into a big square of sponge. They're hydroponically grown. I went ahead and planted them and watered them in and they survived and thrived for good eatin til winter… but, still. Meh.
    So… one reason for cloning (propagating from cuttings) is to keep that sponge out of your garden soil. I'd still go ahead 'n buy them, but only use them for taking cuttings for propagating… and for eating.
    BTW, you don't need to line the windowsill with glasses of water. You can just use one glass of water and put multiple cuttings in it. You'll get plenty of rooting going on and use a fraction of the water. (Maybe it's just my OCD… but I definitely would use separate glasses if you're rooting different varieties of herbs.)

    On the subject of Beans… You might be thinking you're limited in the varieties of beans you can grow… the section with the beans only has a limited variety of bagged beans… right? Well… I was noticing at my local Whole Paycheck store that next to the candy and nuts aisle, where you can package your own bulk candies and nuts, there is a similar section featuring beans. There I found a startling array of various leguminous options. So if you wanted to buy a big one-pound bag of organic white beans, you can! Whatever your culinary preferences, they're available. Black beans, white beans, runner beans, pinto beans, lentils, peas… which means that, whatever your culture, whatever your dietary habits… you can grow them. Your choices are not as limited as you fear they might be.

    GRAIN. I've been thinking about growing fields of grain. Red wheat, white wheat, rye, emmer, spelt, ancient grains… whatever. CHECK your baking aisle. Somewhere in the vicinity of the flour you should find shelves containing various grains. Some of it it processed for making oatmeal (rolled oats or steel-cut, etc), which might make good eating, but I wouldn't bother trying to plant any of those… but the next section will have a bunch of bagged WHOLE GRAIN. (Some people love to grind their own flour fresh.)
    If you can find bags of whole wheat… buy them. Then try planting a plot of them.
    BTW, wild rice is a grain and if you plant them, they will grow. It takes some learning… but it will grow. (I'm looking forward to this learning process… I think.) If needs must, grab some bags of wild rice and take them home and try planting some. Good luck!

    BTW… some grain is used as cover crops between seasons… buckwheat and peas come to mind. And yes, those can be grown as crops for eating. Quinoa in another. Experiment with these and try to learn something from your mistakes. LOL

    Of course, I think the BEST seed-saving technique is to get started growing now what you want to grow in the future. If you order some Glass Gem corn and grow it now, then you'll produce an abundance of corn for eating, as well as a bunch of seed for growing next year. Buy a BUNCH of heirloom varieties of organic corn seeds so that, when you grow them, you can save your own seed for the following seasons. If you're growing it now, you'll have more of it to grow later.

    On the other hand (and I just thought of this), if you buy some beans at the grocery store, you can cook some up and TRY THEM FIRST… and then you can decide whether or not you want to plant them, based on your enjoyment (or lack there-of) of those beans. So yeah, that is definitely a factor. You don't have to plant them and wait for harvest before deciding whether or not that was a good choice for your garden.

    These are always fun discussions.

  12. I read somewhere that the poppy seeds in the spice jars are treated in some way, irradiated perhaps so that they will not sprout. If you grow them you could get in a lot of trouble for producing drugs … i.e. opium.

  13. We never did.
    Until last fall I am learning of cover crops and didn't have suggest cover crop but trid black eye peas as to add nitrogen but late planting but still should have benefits for my garden so a lesson with a little benefits.
    Glad you're back to gardening as it's more my interest.
    Wish my grandfather could have taught me cover crops or perhaps I would have asked him for help before I needed it.
    Thanks for the teaching Lady

  14. Love your channel! My very first gardening experience was when I planted a packet of popping corn when I was about 10 years old and to my amazement it grew actual corn and it was delicious! I’ve been a mad keen vege grower ever since and collect seeds from any wild fruit trees I find.

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