You might be on the alert for people selling potatoes at farmer's markets or roadside stands; just ask them if they grew the potatoes themselves, or if the potatoes were grown commercially. I did read a sad potato story in a rose book; author Liz Drouett, a garden writer & organic rose grower, heard that pioneers would stick rose cuttings in a potato & carry them across the continent to their new homes. & it worked! She tried it & every cutting shriveled & turned black. An older gardener clued her in: you have to use potatoes that don't have the growth retardant.

mrs. emily - several years ago i planted culinary ginger root that i bought at the grocery too. i'm in zone 8, n.c., and i planted mine directly into the garden bed and it has proved quite hardy, dieing back to the ground at first frost, it resumes growing when the soil temp gets back up to around 60 degrees in the spring - in a pot, you can probably keep it evergreen in a greenhouse or a sunny window. as to division, you can, if you so desire, divide the ginger between the 2 shoots. this might best be done after the plant is well established, if it is not already. i have grown gingers in pots as well and they do very nicely that way too - they actually don't seem to mind being fairly pot bound. so far as blooms go, culinary ginger is the only ginger i have ever grown which never has produced a bloom - beautiful foliage, but no flowers, dag-nab-it!!!

I used some green onions from the store. I don't like the white part, it's a little too acrid for me. I was getting ready to toss them and realized there's roots on the end. so I just stuck it in one of the net pots in my hydro unit. a week later I had green leaves shooting up about 6 inches. I did that with the remaining onions I had bought and now I have an unending supply of green onion. whenever I want some I just go out and cut off a couple of leaves. most of the onions have leaves about 2 feet long now.

I bought a beautiful dark red mini at Walmart after Valentine's last year, marked down to about $2. It had about six little plants crammed into the pot. I separated out the plants and potted them up in their own small pots, about 4" size. They grew and bloomed very well last summer. I just potted one up into about a 3 gal. pot. They don't need great big pots while they're small. From a 4" pot I'd pot up into a gallon pot. Then when the plant roots fill the gal. pot you could plant in the ground or in a bigger pot. They do very well in pots. I think your thought about snipping a bud on a tiny plant with poor roots is good. It might help the plant direct its energies more to growing roots.