In the Kitchen - Regrow your celery!!!

I just posted about re-growing green onions in your window sill.  It is very easy to do and I am also experimenting with re-growth of celery.

Again, celery is one of the vegetables on the "dirty dozen" list ..  indicating it contains more pesticides and contaminants than many others do.  As a result I am sad when the pre-Thanksgiving Grocery sale ads came out with conventional celery at 69 cents a bunch.  I buy mine organically and have to pay closer to $2.00 a bunch of celery.  Celery is one of those items at my house that I get only when I need it for a recipe and if I don't use it all, we just don't eat enough of it to prevent it from going bad.  It is something that I routinely dehydrate and keep around for cooking but when a salad or cold dish calls for a little fresh celery, I would really like to have it at my fingertips.

So I was thrilled when I read that you could regrow celery.  The instructions I read called for finding a clump (is it called a clump? - do you know what I mean by that?) with some of the roots still intact.  I was so excited to do this that I bought my organic clump of celery at Whole Foods this week and forgot to check for roots... when I got home with it I found that the roots had been cut off the bottom.  I cut off what I needed for the chicken salad and dehydrated the rest of the stalk (the word stalk just came out of my brain and jumped on the "paper" - so a "clump" must be the same as a stalk).

I read that if you keep at least an inch of the bottom of the celery, you can soak it in water and it will re-grow.  So I cut it off and stuck it in a shallow container.

 Now just a few days later, the most amazing thing is happening, even though by bunch of celery does not have visible roots.  There is a little bit of green leafy growth in the middle of it.  Some of the outer stalks have begun to fall off, but there is life in this little celery and I am going to make sure it grows!!  Take a close look at this picture:

Can you see some leafy growth in the very center? 

For celery, you are to let it take on some growth of a few inches and then re-plant it in some potting soil.  I will be watching for roots to appear and then looking for the right time to put it in a pot. 

I would be excited to have some fresh celery at my disposal through the winter months!!  Try your own at home this Thanksgiving when you are buying a big bunch of it for your stuffing or your veggie trays.