Guerrilla Gardening Tip of The Whenever I Get Around to Posting -- Eighty Sixth Post

If you're like me, you try to eat healthy but have trouble obtaining fresh vegetables due to a variety of reasons. In my case, they are expensive and/or far away. The grocery stores with the cheap, not-so-great produce that I can actually afford is an hour away by bike, and I don't like pestering friends to drive me to the store more than once a week. The grocery stores with decent produce and within half an hour or less by bike are too expensive. So, I get produce once or twice a month and try to make it last. This does not apply when the school community garden is in full swing and I can get produce for the effort of weeding every now and then.

Vegetables! Lovely picture taken from VH Pharmacy, meaning that the rights belong to someone other than me.

Anyway, one thing that has always bugged me is knowing that the really great nutrients in veggies are usually in the most colorful part (to wit, the skin) and that colors generally equal healthy stuff. I rarely peel anything now. But the colorful nutrients still slip through my fingers when I steam my veggies. Steaming is supposed to be one of the healthier ways to cook veggies, but I still lose lots of colorful, nutritious molecules to the water even with a basket to keep the goods out of said water.
It turns out, you can still put those nutrients to use. How, you ask? By watering plants with cooled vegetable water, of course! Just don't salt the water, and you have instant fertilizer. You can also use cooled egg water from boiling eggs; it's allegedly full of calcium and probably won't hurt plants even if it's not.
The beauty of this is that you get to feed yourself healthy stuff and then you get to feed your plants healthy stuff with no extra effort. It's cheaper than commercial fertilizer and less smelly than fish emulsion. You don't even have to measure and mix, just save and cool.
If you are particularly guerrilla-ish, this can be a way to strike back because if you do this with your home-grown vegetables, you're going outside the system entirely. You aren't feeding your plants with industrially-produced chemicals with stuff that can screw up ecosystems, you're feeding them with nutrients salvaged from other plants by you. You're giving back to the ground.

A few caveats:
Don't salt the water. This will kill your plants and ruin your soil.
I don't recommend potato water. Potato skins are good for you, and you can use potato water in cooking, but potato water has been known to kill plants. I'm not sure why. Some sites say you can use potato and pasta water, but I remain unconvinced.
Don't salt the water. You can always salt the veggies later; I find it doesn't make that much of a difference.
Beware of your own eagerness. Cool that water off before you splash it on your plants' delicate roots and all those soil bacteria and related organisms that allow your plants to absorb nutrients.
Don't salt the water.
Consider watering veggie water down if you have young plants with delicate root systems.
Don't salt the water.
Make sure you wash your veggies, especially if they're from the store. There can be all kinds of gunk on the skins. Actually, you should do this regardless of whether or not you're fertilizing plants with the veggie water.
Don't salt the water.
Refrigerate veggie water right away, for two reasons: (1) it will cool down faster and (2) it can go bad quickly. Broccoli water, for instance, smells rotten and turns from pale green to murky brown within four hours of coming off the stove.
And, last but not least, don't salt the water.

It occurs to me that you can also hang onto those nutrients for yourself by drinking the veggie water. My housemate does this.