Growing food was imbued in my mother’s nature having grown up on a farm in Nebraska. She passed her “nature knowledge” to her children by her everyday fecundity. An onion was not just a cooking vegetable, it was an entire lesson in horticulture.

She placed three toothpicks around the perimeter of the onion and suspended it in a glass of water. After a day, roots could be seen sprouted from the bottom. Lesson No. 1. Give the roots a little water and they perform magic growth. The roots feed the green sprouts that emerge from the top of the onion. Sprouts can be clipped off and regrow. They are edible. For me as a child, it was magic, creating something out of nothing.

Key West Master Gardener Robin Robinson was a columnist for the Chicago Daily News. Her books “Plants of Paradise” and award-winning “Roots Rocks and Rain: Native Trees of the Florida Keys” and the newest addition, “Sexy Shrubs in Sandy Soil,” can be found at the Garden Club. This column is part of a series developed by the Key West Garden Club. For information about plants, visit a compilation of previous columns at http://www.keywestgardenclub.com, Robin’s Columns.