Never Buy Green Onions Again: Regrow Them At Home With This Easy Trick

Cooking can create a lot of waste. Even beyond the packages and wrappers, plastic containers, and single-use liners, preparing produce and other fresh ingredients generates a lot of its own byproducts. At the end of the process, you're left with everything from carrot peels to potato eyes littering your countertops (not to mention unused vegetables wilting in the fridge). You can certainly use these scraps in other recipes — apple cores can become apple cider vinegar and chicken bones can turn into broth — but green onions in particular let you take waste reduction a step further. 

These fragrant vegetables are sold with a few roots still attached, which means that it won't take much to bring them back to life. Even recipes that call for using both the green and white parts of the green onion, also known as a spring onion or scallion, will instruct you to cut off the root end and discard it — but next time you make that slice, don't condemn the bulb to a trash receptacle or even to a compost heap. These are food scraps you don't want to throw out. With just a glass of water, some sunshine, and a little patience, you can save money and have constant, fresh access to a delicious kitchen staple.

The title of this article is a slight misnomer, because you will have to buy green onions one more time for this to work. Once you've got your last ever store-bought green onions, chop off the roots with a little bit of the white stalk still intact (and then, of course, use the rest in some other recipe, like spring onion pizza). After rinsing off any dirt, nestle those tips, root side down, in a bowl or jar that's small enough to hold them up, and add just enough water for the roots to be covered but the top to stay dry. Then, find your sunniest windowsill for the jar to live in. Change out the water every few days to keep it fresh, and wait for the new growth. 

It will only be about a week before you have a shoot you can use. To keep the growth going, leave a bit of the white stalk above the root bulb when you harvest. Of course, this isn't a perpetual motion onion machine. Your little water jar will keep producing green onions for a few weeks, but then it will run out of nutrients. In order to really never have to buy green onions again, you'll need to let the vegetable sprout in the jar, then transfer it to soil. Even that isn't hard, though — just make a small hole in the potting soil, stick your green onion roots in with about half an inch above the dirt, and keep them watered.