Here's a fun secret that's also a serious survival skill: a surprising amount of the produce aisle is alive and willing to grow. You don't always need a seed packet — sometimes you need a forgotten garlic head that's started to sprout. It's the cheapest possible way to start a garden, a great project with kids, and a genuine fallback if seed is ever hard to come by.
The reason it works is that these foods are propagation organs — bulbs, tubers, rhizomes, roots — that the plant designed to start the next generation. The grocery store is just selling them as food. Plant them instead and they do what they were built to do.
The sure things
Green onions
Save the white root ends, stand them in a glass of water on the windowsill, and they regrow tops in days. Plant them in soil and they keep going for months. The single easiest one.
Garlic
A head that's begun to sprout is perfect. Break it into cloves and plant each one pointy-end up in fall; each becomes a whole new head by summer. Save your biggest for replanting and never buy it again.
Ginger and turmeric
A knobby piece with a small bud (an 'eye') will sprout. Lay it just under warm, rich soil, keep it humid, and it sends up shoots. Containers are ideal so you can chase the warmth.
Sweet potatoes
Suspend one half-in-water or bury it in damp sand; it pushes out leafy 'slips' you snap off and root. One sweet potato makes a dozen plants.
Potatoes
A potato with eyes, cut into chunks with an eye or two each (let the cuts dry a day first), grows a whole hill of new potatoes.
Lemongrass
Stalks with the base intact will root in a glass of water, then grow into a big clump in the ground.
The 'worth a try' list
- Celery and lettuce: stand the cut base in water and the center regrows a small second harvest of leaves.
- Bok choy and cabbage: same trick — the base resprouts a flush of greens.
- Pineapple: twist off the top, dry it a few days, root it. A multi-year project but a fun one.
- Dried beans, peas, and popcorn from the bulk aisle: often perfectly viable seed for pennies a pound.
- Herbs sold as living potted plants or fresh-cut stems (basil, mint): pot the plant, or root the cuttings.
Where this stops working
Be realistic about the limits. Most grocery tomatoes and peppers are hybrids, so their seed won't come true — fine for a fun experiment, not for a dependable crop. Citrus and apple seeds will sprout but take many years and won't match the parent fruit. And anything treated to not sprout simply won't. For a garden you can rely on, open-pollinated seed and proper starts are still the backbone. But as a free head start, a teaching tool, and a backstop, the kitchen garden is real.
A sprouting onion in the back of the drawer isn't waste. It's a plant asking to be planted.
Why this belongs in a survival plan
Think about what this means if a supply chain ever stutters. The ability to look at ordinary food and see next season's crop is exactly the kind of knowledge that doesn't depend on anything. It costs nothing to practice now, while it's just a fun windowsill project — and the skill is there if you ever need it for real. Pair it with saved seed and the rest of the survival-garden skills in this almanac, and you've got a food system that starts in your own kitchen.
Written by Jordan Polasek, founder of Texas Roots, from his greenhouse in El Campo, Texas. Free to share. If this helped, the best thanks is to grow something or pass it along.