How to make the most of food waste in your garden
Since Dobbies partnered with Too Good To Go, the surplus food app in February 2021, more than 37,500 Magic Bags of fresh and delicious surplus food have been bought from Dobbies’ foodhalls across the country. By saving this food that would ordinarily go to waste, Dobbies also helped save 93.75t of CO2E which is the equivalent of 20 round-the-world flights.
With Stop Food Waste Day on Wednesday 27th April, Dobbies and Too Good To Go are sharing plenty of tips to repurpose food waste in your garden to benefit your plants or try regrowing vegetable scraps into food you can eat and cook with again.
Composting your kitchen scraps and uneaten food is a great way to add nutrients to your garden soil.
To add minerals and nutrients to your compost you can crunch up your eggshells and pop them in your compost bucket. Or use eggshells around your plants; slugs and snails don’t like the feeling of sliding over broken eggshells meaning you can use them as an organic way to discourage these pests without chemicals and pesticides.
If you often find that your food waste bin is rather moist and even has liquid at the bottom, embrace it and use it as plant food! Perfect for feeding houseplants growing in pots, simply drain off any excess liquid when you’re ready to empty the bin and you have ready-made plant food packed with the nutrients of vegetable and food scraps.
Regrowing edible vegetables from food scraps is probably easier than you think and is a great way to reduce food waste in your home.
Spring onions are possibly the easiest of them all – you don’t even need soil to regrow spring onions to add to stir fries and salads. Simply take the bottom white section with little roots at the end and pop it in a glass jar with 3cm of water. Keep it on a sunny windowsill and in a few weeks, the spring onion with regrow out the top.
You can similarly get lettuce roots (the hard bit left when you’ve chopped the leaves off the top) resprouting in water but it will need to be moved to shallow soil once it has started to sprout new leaves and roots. Change the water every couple of days to keep your lettuce root happy before transplanting to compost on a sunny windowsill. Harvest new lettuce leaves when they are at least 10cm long.
Ginger is another easy one to save from food waste and grow on your windowsill. You’ll need your ginger piece to have at least one bumpy nodule to regrow from, then place it under 1cm of soil, lying flat in a shallow container. Place in a humid, sunny spot and wait, in 8-10 months you’ll have full and juicy regrown ginger to eat.
It's a similar story for garlic that’s gone too dry to cook with - you can regrow bulbs from a clove by placing it, with the skin still on, in a shallow dish of water with just the base submerged. The clove will resprout and you can use these to add a garlic flavour to pesto and garnishes. To grow a full bulb again, pot up the sprouted clove in soil. You’ll know the clove is ready for harvesting when the leaves turn yellow which generally takes about 9 months.
When you’re looking for ways to make your gardening more sustainable or reduce food waste in your home, these tips are a great place to start
Composting your kitchen scraps and uneaten food is a great way to add nutrients to your garden soil.
To add minerals and nutrients to your compost you can crunch up your eggshells and pop them in your compost bucket. Or use eggshells around your plants; slugs and snails don’t like the feeling of sliding over broken eggshells meaning you can use them as an organic way to discourage these pests without chemicals and pesticides.
If you often find that your food waste bin is rather moist and even has liquid at the bottom, embrace it and use it as plant food! Perfect for feeding houseplants growing in pots, simply drain off any excess liquid when you’re ready to empty the bin and you have ready-made plant food packed with the nutrients of vegetable and food scraps.
Regrowing edible vegetables from food scraps is probably easier than you think and is a great way to reduce food waste in your home.
Spring onions are possibly the easiest of them all – you don’t even need soil to regrow spring onions to add to stir fries and salads. Simply take the bottom white section with little roots at the end and pop it in a glass jar with 3cm of water. Keep it on a sunny windowsill and in a few weeks, the spring onion with regrow out the top.
You can similarly get lettuce roots (the hard bit left when you’ve chopped the leaves off the top) resprouting in water but it will need to be moved to shallow soil once it has started to sprout new leaves and roots. Change the water every couple of days to keep your lettuce root happy before transplanting to compost on a sunny windowsill. Harvest new lettuce leaves when they are at least 10cm long.
Ginger is another easy one to save from food waste and grow on your windowsill. You’ll need your ginger piece to have at least one bumpy nodule to regrow from, then place it under 1cm of soil, lying flat in a shallow container. Place in a humid, sunny spot and wait, in 8-10 months you’ll have full and juicy regrown ginger to eat.
It's a similar story for garlic that’s gone too dry to cook with - you can regrow bulbs from a clove by placing it, with the skin still on, in a shallow dish of water with just the base submerged. The clove will resprout and you can use these to add a garlic flavour to pesto and garnishes. To grow a full bulb again, pot up the sprouted clove in soil. You’ll know the clove is ready for harvesting when the leaves turn yellow which generally takes about 9 months.
When you’re looking for ways to make your gardening more sustainable or reduce food waste in your home, these tips are a great place to start