My Grandpa Two Rivers is really smart about growing vegetables and fruits and herbs, and last month when I was visiting him and Grandma Two Rivers, he asked me if I wanted to start my own garden at his place so I could have two gardens: One at my house and one at their house.
I was excited and said sure because I think having two gardens would be a little bit like running a very small business and that’s important to know how to do if I’m going to grow up to be a private eye undercover supersleuth detective.
So he went to the fridge and pulled out some celery that only had like four stalks still on it, and he pulled off the four stalks, and handed me the end. I thought he wanted me to throw it out, so I started to take it to the garbage when my grandpa said, “Hey, where are you going with that celery plant?”
I said, “To the garbage. There’s no more celery stalks on it.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I looked at him, then at the celery stalk, and then back at him. “I’m sure,” I replied.
“Look again,” he told me, so I did. I still didn’t see anything except the celery end, so I was a little bit mixed-up about what I was supposed to see.
“Bring it back to the counter,” my grandpa told me, so I brought it back. He took it from my hand, and said, “If you keep this part of the celery, you can grow your own celery, fresh out of your garden.”
Then he took a small aluminum tart tin, filled it with water, and put the celery end in the water.
“When you come back in three or four days, you’ll see something amazing happening with that celery end that most people just throw out,” he said with a smile. He wasn’t lying either, because when I came back three days later, I saw something I didn’t expect to see.
“In a couple more weeks, we can transplant this from the tart tin into a small container with dirt,” my grandpa informed me. I was excited to see what would happen in two more weeks, and then, just like that, two weeks had gone by and it was time to transplant the celery end from the tart tin into a container.
It’s been a week since my grandpa and I transplated that celery end into good dirt to grow, and today I took a picture of it sitting in the sun with some of my grandma’s other plants.

How cool is it to find out that you can grow celery from the end most people throw away in the garbage?
I’m going to ask my grandpa if we can do the same thing with any other vegetables. I know it works with pineapple tops because when I showed grandma my celery plant, she showed me her pineapple plant!
Missy Barrett
13 January 2023