Housing a Forest

I found this great post on how to grow celery and we had to try it.  We have a small backyard garden and we love to grow our own food.  We have never tried growing celery before because it seemed too fussy.  We always have a celery stock in the fridge, and until now the base has been simply discarded to the chickens.  No longer!  The base of a store bought celery is what this experiment uses, which means this experiment is basically free.  Love that!

Simply chop the base from the celery stalk, leaving about 2 inches.  Place it in a dish of water in a sunny location.  It sounded easy enough and really too good to be true.  I’m sure this is NOT necessary, but the kids enjoyed spraying the celery with water.  What ever works to keep them interested right:)  Notice how yellow the center leaves are.  That is the area that we will be watching for growth.

Things start changing rather quickly.  After just a couple days in the water, our celery’s center leaves started growing slightly.  No roots were visible yet.  The kids were amazed that it was actually growing (and so was I!).

After just 1 week, the center leaves were changing color and starting to poke up a little bit.  There were still no roots that we could find.

Since our house does not have wonderful sunny windows for growing plants.  So we resorted to creating a mini green house, and taking the celery outside.  The weather is warming up, but it is still cool outside at nights.  The inverted plastic box helped to regulate the temperature and keep it moist.  Notice all the moisture on the side of the container.  This is also a great way to start seeds, but just make sure you are checking on your plants/seeds, so they don’t get too hot or dry out.

The celery that is growing, has been in the water for three weeks.  We should have already transplanted it into soil, but oh well some day soon.  I am amazed at how little attention these little plants need.  Which is perfect for our house:)  The “new” celery base was just added to the water yesterday.  There is no growth yet, but it will happen really quickly!

We finally transplanted our little celery and he is so happy!  I am curious how long it will take before our little celery plants are ready to be eaten.

Here are a few helpful tips I found when searching for information about growing celery.  Celery does not grow well in hot conditions, so make sure you give your celery plant adequate water.  If your plant does not receive enough water, it will become tough and stringy.  YUCK!  Hope I can keep this little guy hydrated!

Also, know that it is possible to remove only a few stalks at a time rather than harvesting the whole plant. When doing this, make sure you remove the outer stalks first and let the less developed inner stalks continue growing. Take care not to damage the rest of the plant if removing individual stalks.

The kids love snacking on celery, so we are really excited to see how it tastes!  They think it will be AMAZING to run out to the garden and “sneak” a celery stock.  There is something about growing your own food that is really satisfying!