A taste for gardening? Satisfy your appetite with recycled seeds Received by Newsfinder from AP Mar 23, 2003 4:01 Eastern Time

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By DENISE COWIE The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – When Mona Gold eats an orange, she doesn't think of a seed as something to toss in the kitchen trash.

She sees it as a potential houseplant.

And the humble orange isn't the only food from the pantry that, in Gold's hands, has taken on new life as an ornamental plant. The way she sees it, leftover bits of apples, avocados, kiwi fruit, pineapples, peanuts, sweet potatoes, papaya, Jerusalem artichokes, beans, even ginger and chickpeas are all just houseplants waiting to happen.

“Eat the fruit and plant the seed; that's really all it takes,” said Gold, a horticultural therapist and special-projects coordinator at Friends Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia. “It's a wonderful way to be able to garden without spending a lot of money, because these are things you have in your house anyway.”

In the greenhouses at the historic psychiatric hospital on Roosevelt Boulevard, a cluster of potted plants provides lush proof of her words. There are the glossy green leaves of a little tree that began life in an orange someone ate a few years ago, and a handsome avocado plant that was once just the part of the fruit that couldn't be made into guacamole.

At home, Gold creates charming hanging baskets from ordinary chickpeas _ the dried kind, not the mushy ones you buy in a can.

“Get them from a health-food store, because they won't have been treated,” she said, and will be more likely to grow. Put a few peas in a pot of moist soil-less planting mix, cover them with another half-inch of mix, and put the pot into a plastic bag. When the peas sprout, remove the plastic and put the pot in a sunny spot. Chickpea plants have delicate, feathery leaves “that look pretty because they trail over the edges of the basket. They last about six months.”

Golds shows others how to get similar results when she teaches a workshop at the greenhouses on “Plants From the Kitchen.” It's one of the most popular classes in the hospital's spring gardening series of workshops, which are open to the public, and it will be repeated in the fall.

At the workshop, participants will probably plant avocados and papayas, and learn how to make plants from almonds, kiwis, and maybe pomegranates. Gold buys enough of whatever edibles she features, so that everybody gets to taste them as well as harvest the seeds.

Take the once-exotic kiwi, for instance. It's common enough today in supermarket produce departments, but some people still may not know what it tastes like, and even a lot of gardeners don't realize all those little black specks inside are seeds.

“It's the same as the pomegranate,” Gold said. “When you open them up, you have to pull the seeds from the flesh and dry them overnight (before you can plant them). From one fruit, you can have hundreds and hundreds of seeds.”

Then there's the curiously named Jerusalem artichoke. “One of the questions often asked is, 'What does a Jerusalem artichoke taste like?' because a lot of people have never tasted it.”

What they learn is it's not from Jerusalem and it's not an artichoke, either. It's a native of North America _ it probably developed from a species of sunflower found in the Mississippi Valley, and American Indians were using it for food in the 1600s.

It's also a tuber that looks like a nubby potato. Put a whole tuber into a bag of moist peat moss and keep it in a warm place, and within a week buds and roots should start to develop. When the roots are about three inches long, plant the tuber horizontally in a larger pot, with the buds just showing above the soil surface.

“It grows along the roadside,” she said. “People don't realize they're seeing it ... it kind of looks like a sunflower,” and grows three to five feet tall.

All this frugal horticulture might sound a bit like the World War II-era “victory gardens,” but Gold's inspiration was a book she came across years ago, now out of print, called “Don't-Throw-It, Grow-It Book of Houseplants,” by Millicent Ellis Selsam and Deborah Peterson. Gold has been teaching workshops with this theme since the 1970s, and it's still one of her favorites.

“When I became a horticultural therapist, I began using things that were readily available,” said Gold, who earned a degree from Kansas State University in the 1970s, when the program was in its infancy. She began working at Friends Hospital and taught classes in the subject at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown and Temple University Ambler. In the mid-1980s, she was education director at the Cleveland Botanic Garden.

Friends Hospital, which had one of the first horticultural-therapy programs in the country, has long seen gardening as a way to encourage a sense of well-being and accomplishment.

How did Gold develop her workshop? “From reading about all this, I began to look at things in different ways,” she said. “Before, caraway seed was just something I had in the pantry. But then I thought, 'Wow, I could grow those into a houseplant.”'

Recycling kitchen discards into plants is really all about germination techniques, she said: using soil-less mixes and bottom heat; supplying the right amount of moisture, light and humidity; and dealing with insect pests. But it encourages us to see foods we may take for granted in a different light.

Peanuts _ raw, not roasted or salted _ grow into pretty, oval-leaved plants that produce yellow flowers that Selsam and Peterson liken to small sweetpeas. At night, the leaves fold into a “sleeping” position, which fascinates children.

Water chestnuts bought at an Asian market _ not the sliced variety in cans _ can be planted flat-side down, pointy-side up. They are aquatic plants, Gold said, and look a bit like grass.

Ginger is a rhizome that can be grown as a houseplant. Buy fresh ginger, so it will sprout, and plant it in a pot of moist soil-less mix, barely covering the rhizome. Keep the pot in bright light, not sun, preferably with some bottom heat to hasten germination. Ginger grows fast and looks a bit like bamboo.

The best part, though, is that you can slice off a bit from the end of the root to use in cooking without damaging the plant, as long as you cut carefully and don't take too much.

And, of course, there's the good old avocado pit, which grade-schoolers seem to have been growing in water on windowsills since time began.

I was so enthusiastic after I first talked to Gold about recycled food as plants a few weeks ago, that I saved the seed from the next avocado I bought, stuck a couple of toothpicks in it, and suspended it in a glass of water. Nothing's happened.

It could take weeks, Gold said. Or more, warn Selsam and Peterson. “Sometimes, a pit will linger for months,” they write in their book, “and sprout only as you are about to throw it out.”

I'll keep mine a bit longer, if only because the writers hold out hope that “the avocado can become one of the most beautiful plants in your home.”

If you want to experiment with a lot of things, Gold suggests getting to know the produce person at your local market. “Maybe you can ask if you can have the overripe fruit, the stuff they won't be able to sell, because you want to grow the seeds,” she said.

One of her goals as a horticultural therapist is “to excite people about plants in a different way.” She has found that the idea of her “Plants From the Kitchen” workshop tends to fascinate people, whether they are clients in her therapy classes or everyday gardeners who sign up for the public workshops.

“One of the reasons I offer classes to the public is to try to break down the stigma of what mental illness is all about,” Gold said. “Someone with mental illness is just like you or me _ they need a support system. And gardening is one of those wonderful tools that breaks down barriers.”