Celery--free plants to grow



April 8, 2011--celery on day ten at 4 inches



No, I do not like to buy celery. It is rather over-priced in my opinion. As long as I can grow even what I have in the last ten days, cheaply, I will not buy the expensive, poisoned vegetable, celery. This is the first of many plants I intend to grow with the bottom, usually discarded, celery head. No more pesticides for me. I never see organic celery. Maybe I don't look in the right place in town.

This will be a cut-and-come-again plant, used for fresh and eventually cut for dehydrating. My plan is to dehydrate as much as I can with this plant and future celery plants gotten using the same method. Then, I can put dehydrated celery in my coffee bean grinder and make single plant powders and combinations as I experiment.

Someone had a blog post with a tutorial on how to grow celery from the end of the stalk, you know--what you cut off and do not eat. I just knew I would remember who wrote the blog post and refer to it when I grew my own celery. If you know who had the tutorial, I will be glad to reference it.

When I did the celery rescue  and froze it, I had cut off the end with the intention of growing celery like the blogger did. It was just too cold and wet to sit in the back yard that day. I put the end of the celery in a small bowl of water. Too late, I remembered that the water with fluoride and chlorine might kill the possibility of sprouting. Never fear. It did start growing in the water.

Today, April 2, I got all my supplies out for this experiment. Yes, some time ago I had purchased soil in which to germinate seeds. No, I have not done that yet. Anyway, here goes:

These are the supplies I took outside. Of course, the box holds more than the pots. The gallon vinegar jug is cut around the top. Just below the handle about two inches is uncut. No picture except this one. I put three V-cuts in the bottom of the jug for drainage. Then, I decided I needed to take pictures. To germinate seeds, I would cut only about 5 inches from the bottom, leaving the top as a tall greenhouse. Since the celery may need more soil, I chose to cut the jug higher.

Cut the holes or slits for drainage before you cut the top. Since I cut around the jug first, it was unstable, leading me to fear I was going to cut myself as the jug kept collapsing as I struggled to cut with the utility knife.

Here, I have filled the jug with soil, heaped up. In the bottom of the jug you can see the natural, unbleached coffee filter I used to retain soil in the jug.





in water for three days



planted at three days, just after the above picture in water

I will be planting more celery as I get the bottoms, from where I have no idea at the moment. The plan is to dehydrate and make some celery powder by putting the dehydrated celery in with other vegetables I grow, dehydrate and grind. I am thinking of using the combinations I use most often--garlic, celery, onions and bell peppers. Of course, I don't have or use the powders. I use the fresh or frozen vegetables for the taste. Or, I could have the plain specimen of each powdered, dehydrated vegetable.

The celery at the top of the page is the result of five minutes work. It took ten days to reach this point, six days of the ten were days spent in soil.

Your turn
Have you ever planted and grown celery this way? If so, how tall did it grow? How successful would you describe your efforts? Who is going to try to grow celery this way?