Making Use of Scraps

Gardening, especially on a large scale, means creating a lot of organic waste.

While there are some plants where the whole thing is edible, such as chives and leeks, most plants result in edible products but the rest of the plant dies at the end of the season. Or in the case of perennial bushes and trees, the leaves fall off as the plant goes into hibernation.

Nothing truly goes to waste, though. We compost religiously. We have four bins in our backyard and collect compostable goods from our house, my mom’s house, a coworker, and occasionally the discarded coffee grounds from the office.

But beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed looking for new and creative ways to use the scraps or parts of plants we’d normally throw out.

Garlic scapes

We’ve already talked about garlic scapes a few times here on Urban Homesteading, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about them as time goes on.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They’re long, thick, and have a delicious bite of garlic. They can be pickled, grilled on the BBQ, turned into hot sauce, or thrown in dinner where you’d otherwise use garlic. The possibilities are almost too much to list here.

Pea pods

This is one I haven’t tried yet but I am so curious to do so: pea pod wine.

We grow a ton of peas. Along our front and side fence we grow sugar snap peas, which are meant to be eaten whole. When the harvest gets too large, I usually shell them and freeze the peas, discarding the pods.

In our neighbour’s yard, we have a long trellis set up where we grow Alaskan peas. These ones are a bit hardier and can be pressure canned and sit on a shelf until ready to eat. This similarly involves shelling all the peas.

With either harvest, I’m left with quite the pile of empty pods.

I happened to notice a recipe for pea pod wine and my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I will be trying it this year. I’ve found that vegetable based wines rarely taste like the vegetable they’re made from, while fruit wines tend to preserve that flavour. I’ve made beet wine and parsnip wine, and the beet wine ended up fruity and the parsnip wine tasted like a regular white wine.

Vegetable juice

This past weekend, my husband thinned out the carrots and beets. When planting these, the usual practice is to over-plant and then when they start coming up, yank some out so the remaining plants have enough room to keep growing.

After he did this thinning, he gave me a crate full of baby carrots and baby beets. And when I say “baby”, I don’t mean the size of baby vegetables you get at the store, I mean micro-baby, too small to really do anything with.

We decided to juice these. I pulled out my steam juicer, which is incredibly convenient, mess free, and easy to use. It took three batches, but I juiced all the carrots and beets—including the greens—as well as an old bag of frozen celery from last year that we never ended up using.

I got 20 cups / 5 litres of juice. I put them all in individual one-cup jars, leaving headspace in case of expansion, and put them all in the freezer. My husband will be drinking them once a day as part of his lunch.

Onion and garlic seasoning

While there isn’t much waste when cutting onions and garlic—it’s mostly the papery skins and perhaps the tops or bottoms—this is still flavourful waste. One way to use this up is to create onion and garlic seasoning.

When chopping onions and garlic, separate the papery skins from the waste. (If there are any bits that have actual onion or garlic attached to them, like if you slice off the top of the onion to help you peel it, hold onto that for the next idea down in this post.) Discard anything that doesn’t look great.

After giving these skins a quick wash, you can put them in the oven to dry them, then grind them in a food processor or blender. While it’s not quite the same as onion powder or garlic powder, it can be used similarly. However, I tend to sprinkle it over my fries for an extra tasty kick.

You can also save the skins in a bag in your freezer until you’ve got a big enough batch to make this project worth the effort.

Vegetable broth

Save any usable vegetable scraps! Anything that looks in good condition (blemish and rot free) and is safe to eat (remember, tomato leaves and potato eyes are unsafe to eat), throw into a Ziploc bag or container in the freezer. When you’ve got a big batch, you can make vegetable broth.

To do this, simply dump all the frozen scraps into a big pot, fill with water, and let it simmer for an hour or so until all the deliciousness of the scraps has leeched into the water. Strain out the solids and you’re left with a rich broth. If you have a pressure canner, you can use that to can the broth, and if you don’t you can freeze it in jars, ensuring you leave headspace in case it expands in the freezer.

You’ll want to avoid anything that has an off taste or would overtake things—broccoli can be bitter when preserved and beets can make everything beet red. But the options are almost endless and allow for creating unique broth—I often throw in onions, garlic, herb scraps, mushroom stems, squash peels, carrot peels, celery leaves, tomato skins, and more.