Stews certainly help to take the chill out of winter. That’s why, after reading an article about growing a compost garden in the Illinois News Gazette, the kids and I decided to grow a garden from the leftover roots from fresh vegetables from our latest stew.
Photography by Justine Hand.
Root vegetables such as the carrots, potatoes, and beets above lend themselves quite well to compost gardening, as do beans and bulbs like onions and garlic.
For leafy vegetables like carrots and beets, select specimens with the tops intact.
Prepare a bed of gravel, small stones and/or soil in a shallow dish or pie plate. We chose an antique cash drawer from Oh Albatross, which we lined with plastic.
For carrots and beets, push them into the gravel cut side down and add water to the top layer of rocks. As a bulb, garlic takes well when placed shoulder-deep in either soil or gravel.
Remember this technique with avocado pits?
After a couple of weeks, our carrot tops are coming along nicely.
Our beans began to sprout too.
Garlic greens can actually be harvested to add a bit of flavor to future soups and stews.
Here is our whole garden after about three weeks.
As the kids admire their new garden, I’m thinking that I’ve secured two recruits to help with the real thing this summer.