How To Garden Using Food Scraps for a More Sustainable Garden

Sustainable gardening has been getting more and more popular every year—and for good reason.

Not only is it better for the planet, but it also tends to be much lower maintenance and less expensive than the alternatives. Sustainable gardening includes everything from leaning into native plants to using organic mulches, but one great way to make your space more sustainable, less expensive, and, dare I say, more efficient is to use your own food scraps in the garden.

There are two main ways to effectively garden with food scraps: composting them or planting them directly into the ground to regrow what you once ate.

Give Composting a Try

You probably already know about composting your old food scraps, but here’s a healthy reminder. You can toss fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, tea bags, nutshells, and more in a compost bin.

Add yard waste like leaves and grass clippings, and make sure you maintain a balance of nitrogen-rich and carbon-rich materials—one way to do that is to ensure you have a balance of green and brown in your compost.

You’ll want to turn the pile to aerate it regularly and after a few months, the compost will break down into a dark soil you can add to your garden beds. Similar to composting, you can also add food scraps into your vermicomposting bin. Vermicomposting is basically composting with the additional help of red wiggler worms.

If you’d like to decompose and enrich your soil naturally but don’t want to compost, you can simply bury the food scraps about six to eight inches deep in your garden bed. Over time, the scraps will break down and add nutrients to the soil. Just be careful with this option because too many scraps could attract pests.

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Replant What You Already Have

The most exciting way you can grow an entire garden using food scraps is to literally replant them. This doesn’t work for all scraps, but it works for quite a few of them.

You can place the white roots of a green onion in a glass of water in a sunny spot, change the water every few days, and they’ll regrow within a few weeks.

You can place the base of a head of lettuce in a shallow dish of water in a sunny spot, and it will do the same. And if you place potato eyes—those small sprouts that grow out of a potato that might have been sitting on your countertop for too long—in soil, they’ll grow into new potato plants.

You can regrow celery in water and then transplant it into soil. Individual garlic cloves in well-drained soil will grow into a new garlic bulb. If you cut the top inch of a carrot off and place it in a shallow dish of water, new greens will sprout, and you can plant them in the soil like seeds.

If you cut the bottom half of an onion off and plant it, new onions will grow. You can grow bok choy, fennel, sweet potatoes, lemongrass, and more simply by keeping your scraps and using them to your advantage.

If you use these methods, you’ll have a flourishing, sustainable garden in no time.