'Like magic': My surefire hack to bring wilted celery back to life

One of my biggest annoyances is the amount of food waste my household generates. I can never seem to judge the right amount of fruit and vegetables needed to satisfy my family.

So, with grocery prices skyrocketing, when a bunch of celery wilted in the fridge days after I bought it for a dish requiring just one stem, I resisted the urge to throw it away.

Instead, I insisted I could bring it back from the dead, and the results so amazed my sceptical son I felt I owed it to 9honey readers to share it.

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But first, some background.

Celery is a vegetable that belongs to a family of aromatic flowering plants known as apiaceae. It has been used since ancient times, with the plant's stalks, leaves and roots (celeriac) all able to be used either raw in juice and salads, or cooked in soups and stews.

Celery, while made up of 95 per cent water, contains large amounts of vitamin K, which is known to aid blood clotting and maintain healthy bones, and it is known to benefit liver health.

But it is the fact it contains so much water that can also lead to its undoing.

You see, popping a bunch of celery in a crisper drawer without wrapping it, or cutting it and placing the stalks in a sealed container, allows cellular water loss to take place.

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This occurs because the dry air inside the fridge literally sucks the moisture out of the celery's cells, leaving it limp and rubbery.

Furthermore, celery produces something called ethylene gas, which causes fruit to ripen, but in the case of celery, accelerates the wilting process.

Then there is the fridge itself. Even if you place unwrapped celery into crisper drawers that offer higher humidity, they don't prevent enough moisture loss.

There are all sorts of methods on the internet for extending a celery's life, which involves everything from wrapping it in wet paper towel, placing it inside foil or cutting it up and putting it in an airtight container.

But I don't always have time for this, and it doesn't help once the celery has wilted.

There are also hacks for bringing wilted celery back to life, which includes cutting it up and submerging the pieces in a container of water that you then place in the fridge.

This is, again, time-consuming and also takes up a lot of space in the fridge if you are dealing with a whole bunch.

My hack is simpler, quicker, and doesn't take up any room in the fridge.

Firstly, I call it mine because I have been doing this for years – long before the words TikTok and 'hack' came on the scene.

My idea came about after becoming sick and tired of throwing away almost whole bunches of wilted celery.

Standing in my kitchen one day, I decided to put something my mum taught me years earlier to the test.

She had always professed you could bring wilted iceberg lettuce back to life by soaking it in a sink full of water.

This prompted my idea: A celery stalk kind of resembled a flower stalk, so I decided to slice off the entire base of the celery then plunge the stalks into glasses of water.

I didn't know if it would work. And in fact, nothing much happened straight away.

But within a few hours, those stalks were standing up straight, having sucked up the water in the glass.

As I manically plunged celery into a glass recently, my son shook his head.

"I think you're wasting your time, Mum. That celery is dead," he said with authority.

"No, you just wait and see," I insisted.

I could tell he thought he had won a couple of hours later when he saw me chopping up a still wilted stalk of celery to add to dinner.

But the next morning, my celery stalks were no longer wilted, but standing to attention, as if by magic. And the longer they stayed in the water, the better they got.

There was also no need to cut up the celery and place it in containers in the fridge.

For days, the celery stayed in the glasses of water, which I would top up or replace with fresh water.

Any time I needed a celery stick to cook with or eat, I simply whipped it out of the water, cut off the end and voila!

There are a couple of downsides to this method. You need two to three very large, heavy glasses, which will need to stay on your kitchen bench for days on end.

Also, you are likely to either knock one over or they will simply topple over from the weight of the celery.

After about a week, I ended up trimming and cutting up any leftover celery and placing it in an airtight container in the fridge, but whether it was because it was nearing the end of its life or because I had taken away its water source, it only ended up lasting another day or two before I had to toss it away.

But I did end up using almost an entire bunch of celery, and extending its life by a week. using this simple hack.

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