Growing Celery Indoors: Never Buy Celery Again

[via: 17 Apart]

Remember when we tested and shared how to grow onions indefinitely last week? Well, at the same time, we’ve been testing out another little indoor gardening project first gleaned from Pinterest that we’re excited to share the success of today — regrowing celery from its base.

We’ve figured out how to literally re-grow organic celery from the base of the bunch we bought from the store a couple weeks ago. I swear, we must have been living under a rock all these years or just not be that resourceful when it comes to food, but we’re having more fun learning all these new little tips and tricks as we dive deeper into trying to grow more of our own food.

This project is almost as simple as the onion growing project — simply chop the celery stalks from the base of the celery you bought from the store and use as you normally would. In our case, we had a particular homemade bean dip that needed sampling!

Instead of tossing the base, rinse it off and place it in a small saucer or bowl of warm water on or near a sunny windowsill — base side down and cut stalks facing upright.

We let our celery base hang out in the saucer of water for right around one week, give or take. Over the course of the week, the surrounding stalks began to dry out significantly, but the tiny little yellow leaves from the center of the base began thickening, growing up and out from the center, and turned a dark green. The growth was slow, but steady and evident.

After the 5-7 days were complete, we transferred our celery base to a planter and covered it completely save for the leaf tips with a mixture of dirt and potting soil.

We watered it generously and after planting in the soil, the overall growth really took off. Not only do we have celery leaves regenerating themselves from the base, but you can see clear stalks making their way up and out. It’s truly fascinating what we have not even a week after planting in the soil:

A few notes:

  • Change out the water every couple of days while in the “saucer” phase of the project. We also used a spray bottle to spray water directly onto the base of the celery where the leaves were growing out. 
  • The tutorials we saw showed planting the celery directly into the dirt outside — you may want to go this route if you live in a temperate area or want to be able to harvest outdoors. We went with an indoor planter since it’s still pretty cold here in VA, we have limited outdoor space in the city, and the space we do have is currently unprotected from our curious puppy.
  • Continue to generously water the celery after planting to keep it thriving. 

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