Experimenting With Celery

For several years, I tried to plant celery seed to grow our own celery.  We like celery.  It is part of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking (onion, bell pepper, and celery) that serves as the base for many dishes we enjoy.  We grow onions, and we grow bell pepper.  I've never been able to grow celery from seed, despite trying several times.  It's not due to our locale, because we have friends that live 30 minutes away from us that can grow it just fine.  They even dug some plants up for us and gave them to us.  I planted them.  They promptly died.  

So we've resorted to buying it from the store.  My wife happened to see that you can grow celery from what's left over from your store bought celery.  We decided to give it a try.  She cut the celery we were going to eat off the stalk, leaving about 3 inches from the bottom.  Then she used a knife to barely cut off the bottom where the roots were.  She placed the celery, root side down, in a bowl of water and placed on the window sill.

In just a couple of days, fresh, new, green growth popped up out of the old celery scraps!  Over the next few days, fresh root growth appeared on the bottom of the celery in the water.  This thing wanted to live!

We prepared a nice spot in our herb garden, right between the ginger and parsley and oregano plants and planted it and watered it in.

Each day we check on it and keep it well-watered since it is so dry right now.  I moved some mulch around the base of the celery plant to keep the soil moist.  Celery loves cooler weather, so hopefully this one will flourish.  Tricia's already gotten another one sprouting on the window sill.  We'll see what happens.  Maybe, even though I never had success growing celery from seed, we will see success growing celery from the grocery store.  We'll keep you posted as the experiment progresses.