Green Onion
I watch plenty of YouTube videos on gardening and growing your own greens. Most of the videos I watched for beginners said to try growing green onions bought from the store. After you cut what you need for cooking don't throw the lower halves away! Put them in water, rain water preferably. I placed the cuttings in a clear glass vase and filled it half way up the stems with water. I'm fortunate enough to have a windowsill that got a lot of sun all day with a wide surface for placing vases.
It took about a week and a half, the greens took off! I have a small bushel of greens and it grows faster than I can use. I cook rice and meat a lot and I use green onions as toppers. Just about every four days I will clip two long stems and by the time I need more I use two different stems. Cycling this way keeps me in the greens. I currently have two pots with green onions. They are tastier than when I first got them from the grocery store. I planted them in pots once the roots started curling around the bottom of the vase. Also just a quick note, if you try this be sure to change your water out once every two days till you are ready to pot. You can feasibly keep them in water the whole time but the taste will fade, at least that is what I noticed. Once I got them in pots the flavors grew intense.
Ginger
After I felt like I wasn't the destroyer of plants I moved onto ginger. I noticed that the ginger I got from the grocery store was starting to stem. So I plopped it in soil without any research. A few weeks went by and nothing. So I dug up the bulb and it had rotted. With a deflated ego, I looked online and found out that the little stem or node was suppose to be outside of the soil. So I went rummaging through my ginger stash and found one that seemed ready to be planted. Ginger will look ready to be planted when they look a bit shriveled up and dry. I then took my shriveled up ginger piece and placed it in water for 24 hours because the Youtube said so. lol. I then selected a container with good drainage and place it node up. After two weeks I saw my first promise of life by a thick green stem spearing out of the soil. The above pic is about three weeks of growth. I have three containers of ginger now. I have yet to know when to harvest but I think they are slow growers. Will research that more.
Even with my two successes with onions and ginger I had epic failures, that was growing potatoes. I watched videos and realized that I was doing it very wrong. I had placed the whole potato in the large container with the eyes down. Also the container I placed it in had no drainage. Needless to say the potato rotted.
This was around the time I had decided to try making compost. I threw the rotted potato and most of its dirt into a big container and started throwing veggie food scraps, brown cardboard, leaves, coffee, dried crushed eggshells, seaweed and many assortment of things. The only things I didn't throw in were meats, dairies and anything with oils. By the time my ginger along with two successful garlics were nice and green and mature looking some of the compost was ready to throw in. About a month and a half. I used it on my tomatoes, garlic, gingers, blueberries, strawberries, flowering plants, green onions. Everything! Compost makes all the difference! A future homesteader should think about making their own compost. Its so easy and it's so beneficial.
Other than the green onions, ginger, garlic and one of the rosemaries. I bought the other plants already established. My biggest failure has ALWAYS been strawberries. My husband talks about how he threw them in dirt and bam!! More strawberries than he knew what to do with when he was a kid. I kill them with a touch. That was my thing, killing strawberries.
So I tried again and things were looking good. Compost and some dirt. Well drained, plenty of sun. The plants were sending runners out like crazy but no flowers. So I read up and watched more videos; all suggest to cut the runners to get more energy to flowering. I cut about 3/4 of the runners and allowed a few to root. I got flowers about two weeks ago and strawberries are forming. I won't call this a success till I get a red juicy berry in my mouth. =) But hey, at least they are alive.
Strawberry Plant
My thoughts on growing food is that it is possibly the most empowering thing a human can do for themselves. Make compost, collect rain water if able and educate on the varieties that interest you. You will be surprised by the ease of it. Yes, there is work but its good work. Even if you fail, understand how you failed and continue. I by no means had a green thumb before starting all of this. I killed weeds if I watered them. BUT I can feel my thumbs turning green now. Its not a process you can hurry or find a magical fix. It takes a bit of research and some level of attentiveness. But you can see results after awhile. Here is my gardens as of now:
Various Flowering
Rosemary
