Fun outdoor activities to do with your kids!

Supermarket Freebies

by Anita Sands Hernandez
Contributed by www.Frugal-moms.com Inc.

Get many of your plants from the supermarket. Every super market has ginger roots. Ask produce manager to save the ones that are sprouting for you. They're even better than the fresh kind that has no sprouts. Buy a passion fruit as ONE fruit has l00 vines inside it. Buy a chayote. (With chayotes, you have to go thru a thousand to find one with a sprout coming out of its butt because they KEEP those for planting back at the chayote factory).

Maybe you can get the sprouted ones at half cost. But chayotes with tails and ginger with sprouts WILL do glorious thing sin your garden. Ginger is an incredibly fragrant Hawaiian flower, called frangipangi, and chayotes a vine that will cover a tree or garage and give you hundreds of green delicious squash.

Passionfruit also will go up a tree or cover a garage and purple eggs tastier than peaches fall rolloff and fall on the ground. Their purple fruit is at every market these days for a buck each. Other grocery market freebies? You've seen those small green paper tomatoes? Well the ripe, yellow tomatillos are better for seed. Peel and see if it's starting to get yellowish maybe ask produce manager for these if he isn't putting them out.

A friend of mine has a tart, aromatic yellow guava tree called the pink guava.. That fruit is true to seed so its seed is a treasure to share. Maybe you'll find a guava in the super market. It'll work. Ditto the Purple Passion Fruit vine with a hundred seeds in each fruit. Plumeria trees give fingers for cuttings.

RED tomatos yield seeds. Squish the seed into a glass of water, leave overnight. Use the tomato flesh in salad. Mangoes, papayas yield seeds. Possible lists are longer than my memory. I just found tamarind pods at mySuper. Seeds are like agate or rubies. In 8 years I'll have pod-bearing trees for candy and soft drinks. Pineapple tops are easy to root, potatoes, yams, raw peanuts are all great possibilities. Cilantro seed is sold as a spice on the rack where Mexican spices are in generous bags.

Get clippings from your friends' and neighbors' gardens. Just use your fingernail to break off a twig below a joint. Your smock have a large, loose pocket? In it goes. If you have a lanai or glass or lath house, you can root things even in summer. Or do it in semi-shade in spring or autumn when heat in air won't destroy clippings. Or, have a glass jar collection ready for cutting the second you come in the door.

Have your homemade, freebie rooting hormone, too. How? WILLOW WATER! Mash a bundle of willow tree twigs (not leaves, twig part) in water, leave them soaking overnight, then remove branches, keep in FRIDGE. Do this weekly. Let cutting soakin willow water for a few min, then plant. Toss willow mash out weekly as it rots. There is a miraculous rooting hormone in willow twigs! GET CLIPPINGS from your neighbors' plants. Get your EQUIPMENT from garage sales and families who move from homes into apartments, get seeds, cuttings out of NATURE.

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