This is a really fun little project! It’s interesting to watch, fun to do with the kids, AND it makes your life a little easier because you’ll never have to worry about forgetting to pick up green onions at the store again. The next time you pick up a bundle of green onions at the store, just follow these quick instructions to re-grow them!
So first you’ll need your green onions. As far as I can tell, any ol’ green onion bundle will do, but of course try and pick the healthiest-looking ones like you normally would.
Go ahead and use them in your recipe, but instead of using the whole thing, only chop off the top dark green parts and leave the white parts along with the light green parts and the bulbs with the little roots at the bottom. That should be about this tall.
These onions re-grow really easily, so don’t worry about it too much, just eyeball it! This batch had already been growing for about a week and had already been harvested once. I just decided on a whim to share this fun idea with you so that’s why you can see that the old parts had started to dry out already.
Place your green onions in a glass of cool water, filling it up so that it just covers the white parts of the onion.
And that’s it! No fertilizers or rooting hormone needed for this! Place the glass on a counter near a window and watch in amazement at how fast they grow!
Within a few days you’ll have something that looks like this:
The pieces that you cut off will start with dry out so that they aren’t taking any energy from the new shoots and the roots will grow like crazy!
Change the water out every 2 or 3 days to keep things fresh and happy and harvest your green onions whenever you need them for a salad or a recipe.
Once you have a good root system going, you can go ahead and plant them in your garden or in a pot on the patio if you like and if it’s the right time of year! Why not?
There are quite a few different things that you buy at the grocery store that you can re-grow at home, but this one is the easiest that I’ve come across so far, so of course it’s my favorite!
Have you ever tried re-growing grocery store fruits and veggies before? If not, make sure you give this one a try next time you have the chance!
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.