Propagating edible houseplants

Propagating Edible Houseplants

Dreams of growing your own fruit and vegetables? James teaches you how to propagate fruit and vegetables, turning your food waste into thriving plants.

Plants to Grow from Seed

• Begonia
• Saintpaulia
• Palms (the Date palm, Phoenix dactylifera)
• Rare cacti and succulents: Lithops, Haworthia, Astrophytum

Basil

• Take out the straggly baby leaves, and you can start to see light penetrates to surface level.
• Fewer plants in a pot mean less competition and that they will be able to grow much more healthily.
• Pinching out the top section of leaves to encourage lovely dense growth.
• This technique can be applied to any number of houseplants from a garden centre.
• The warmer the environment, the better the basil tastes.

Chillis

• If you want very spicy chillies, it's best to grow them indoors.
• Take the seeds that you would normally waste, fill a pot with potting mix and place the seeds on the surface.
• Position in a south-facing room.
• Place them in a tray full of plants to increase humidity, creating a microenvironment.

Avocados

• Place an avocado seed with the pointed end up in a glass of water.
• Eventually roots with start to form.
• Another way is to take a jar of water, spiking three toothpicks into the seed and suspend it above the water.
• I put the avocado seed on a bright windowsill.

Citrus Plants

• Cut into an orange, remove the seeds, plant them in a pot with soil.
• Within a month you should see shoots.
• It can take up to 5 years for the fruit to grow. The leaves of the oranges and the lemons may be used as herbs.
• Limes are harvested when unripe, and when they are ripe they look like miniature lemons.
• Lemongrass can be pushed into potting mix, kept well-watered and kept in a bright location.
• Ginger can also be grown easily in a basic potting mix.

Pineapple

• If you can easily pull out a pineapple leaf from the centre of the crown, it means it's ripe.
• Cut off the crown, pulling off the lower leaves leaving a 3cm stump.
• Bury the stump in a well-drained potting mix. Place it in a bright position out of direct sunlight. Let it dry out between watering, eventually, it will root and grow into a young pineapple plant.

Your Notes

Start to draft a list of the fruits and vegetables you might want to propagate.