Much more appetizing and healthier than bugs for sure. Bugs have some similarities to shellfish in that they carry some weird stuff in them such as parasites, since we dont really cook them parasites can live on in you. Re the sprouting, I would add to use unbleached or naturally bleached paper towels, sorry if I missed it if you mentioned. Dream like visualization for fun; Imagine if your whole living area was used to grow sprouts, a giant chia pet apartment all surfaces, everywhere. Except maybe the bed, that would be too weird. And the toilet seat, too weird. I have seen a vid of someone using abandoned car tops to grow food, maybe it was entire cars...oh, here it is...https://www.wapcar.my/news/thailand-taxi-companies-are-growing-food-on-abandoned-cars-to-feed-outofwork-drivers-33872
As an apartment dweller, I have no access to a garden or any other kind of outdoor space for growing, so I turned to sprouting. In addition to several seeds types mentioned above, I've also had great results sprouting lentils, which are very cheap and grow very quickly. I usually do four days in the dark, one day in indirect light. Nice flavor and very filling. In any case, I have been using mostly jars up to now; I like the look of those trays... Thank you for this very useful post!
everyone should look into making their own sauerkraut (or kimchi for some adventure). It's dead simple. you can turn a cabbage into a delicious gut biome treat in a couple of days on your kitchen counter. hated the stuff when I was a kid. i just don't remember it tasting so good. goes very well with meat. the basic process is to break down the cells of the cabbage with salt by hand in a large mixing bowl, pack in a large glass / porcelain jar with a weight to hold the cabbage below the level of it's own liquid created when you mixed by hand with salt. that's it really. Add your favorite spices and you've got a tasty nutritional side dish in a couple of days. Lots of recipes online. highly recommend!!
I love that! Broccoli is supposedly second only to wheatgrass, health wise that is.
Wheatgrass requires a press but if I’m not mistaken 1oz of it=34 oz of a mix of fruits and vegetables. But that’s an old stat I was told at a health food store a while back, so grain of salt. It does make sense, when one drinks it, it feels like pure chlorophyll... IMHO, it’s the other “blood” of nature. But, broccoli sprout supposed to have anti carcinogens.
Beautiful! We have tried sprouting in Thailand (watercress) but in the ground and with our chickens/duck they had to be carefully covered with palm fronds. We had good results and some very edible salad greens for a few weeks. I remember sprouting wheat grass in a windowsill back from my LA days...it was all the rage back then. Generally we have too many established fruit trees here but it's great for a small area thanks for the tutorial!
Thank you. You've inspired in me an urge to go and find my Freshlife Automatic Sprouter, which is currently somewhere in my junk room, under a mountain of actual junk!
I started growing microgreens back in 2020, during our lockdown here in Australia. I have a couple of different seed trays, including your #2 (which indeed is a bit large for one planting for 1-2 people, but is otherwise quite good). I made my own out of some of those disposable mushroom trays, by putting a lot of holes in the bottom with a small soldering iron, and using an intact one as the drip tray. I line my trays with pieces of fibreglass insect screening cut to size, covered in a thin layer of coconut coir. These trays, and the insect screening, are resusable, and the coconut coir is cheap, easy, & retains water. I never bother with soaking the seeds. (Well, I did try it once, and it was a real pain to spread the wet seeds evenly. So that was that.)
My favourites are broccoli & red cabbage (I usually sow these in the same tray, half each, because they have similar sprouting & growing times), and most recently, peas (both snow peas and regular peas - the shoots are much the same, mild-flavoured and tender), black sunflower, buckwheat, and chard (a couple of mixes, eg rainbow chard, but all are good).
I don't like kale. Or kale sprouts. It's a matter of personal taste...
I've also tried bok choi (pak choi) and sorrel, & plan to repeat these as good eating salad greens.
Full grown bok choi is a bit strong for me, but the microgreens are lovely.
Recently, in Australia we have had heavy rain & flooding which have devastated our food-bowl areas, and lettuces have been either impossible to get, or very expensive.
So I was very, very glad to have my little bench of microgreens, which actually make a much nicer & easier substitute for lettuce!
I use hydroponic fertiliser rather than water, once the seeds have sprouted, and this does make them grow faster.
I've also tried growing some salad greens hydroponically, in Kratky buckets (google it!), which is a bit more work, though I have managed to grow basil very successfully, and some types of lettuce.
I live in sub-tropical Brisbane, where it is a bit warm for lettuce (especially in summer, when you most want it!)
So microgreens work really well for me, and the chard, pea sprouts, and sunflower produce enough bulk to make a decent salad.
Loved this, and the photos were a great addition. I've sprouted for years, but love the extra ideas you had that I hadn't used. I plan to revamp my own approach. Thanks!
Fabulous. I enjoy dandelions, nettles and other free herbs, mint, sage, especially, from the garden and countryside. The countryside and small pockets of greenery and nature offer all sorts of free organic fresh food. Significantly when we eat more naturally we need to eat much less. Much of the 'developed' world's problems, especially chronic diseases (which did not feature in mortality rates 150 years ago) and people's addictions and fundamental enslavement by banks etc., are because powerful wealthy corporations learnt how to leverage trauma and humans' evolved propensity to become addicted to sugars, etc., that served us well in the foraging hunter-gathering millennia (before 10-20,000 years ago, with the obvious exception of Native American Indians, now challenged enormously by obesity = metabolic syndrome and diabetes, because just a few generations ago all they ate was bison/buffalo), but since then basically our evolved susceptibility to food addiction has become our undoing. LiveWildLiveFree.org Also HealthResults.com and LowcarbFreshwell.co.uk are real examples of the new ground-upwards new health economies emerging (increasingly everywhere), and reversing the harms of the past centuries.
When I initially subscribed to RTE, all e-mail notices of new articles showed up in my gmail inbox. Now they are regularly showing up under the "promotions" tab, this forces me to go look for them and move them to the inbox. This also happened to Alex Berensen, and boriquagato. It appears lists are being made and certain information sources are being shuffled into invisibility via those lists.
Thank you for this! I have been using a sprouting lid and jar for years with broccoli sprouts. Recently they've not been doing too well. I may need to try the tray method.
We used to do sprouting of many of these same seeds, but after a couple months with things working OK, we started having mold problems, where the seeds would mold before they had sufficiently sprouted/grown shoots. Tried using dilute peroxide in the water to no avail. Finally gave up. It was a commercially made sprouter tray (plastic) that we were using, but I don't remember the brand. Have you ever had problems with mold, and if so, what did you do about it?
Growing food is the ultimate act of resistance and it's incredibly rewarding by so many measures including fresher taste that's unbeatable. It wouldn't be me without a reminder to choose organic and heirloom seeds rather than assume all seeds are equal. Also try to avoid Amazon that feeds Bezos and go straight to the source and support the many small farms directly. Every dollar is a vote so vote for the small, pure, local options. Organic Consumers has some tips & sources.
Much more appetizing and healthier than bugs for sure. Bugs have some similarities to shellfish in that they carry some weird stuff in them such as parasites, since we dont really cook them parasites can live on in you. Re the sprouting, I would add to use unbleached or naturally bleached paper towels, sorry if I missed it if you mentioned. Dream like visualization for fun; Imagine if your whole living area was used to grow sprouts, a giant chia pet apartment all surfaces, everywhere. Except maybe the bed, that would be too weird. And the toilet seat, too weird. I have seen a vid of someone using abandoned car tops to grow food, maybe it was entire cars...oh, here it is...https://www.wapcar.my/news/thailand-taxi-companies-are-growing-food-on-abandoned-cars-to-feed-outofwork-drivers-33872
Thanks so much for the brilliant information Mrs C!
As an apartment dweller, I have no access to a garden or any other kind of outdoor space for growing, so I turned to sprouting. In addition to several seeds types mentioned above, I've also had great results sprouting lentils, which are very cheap and grow very quickly. I usually do four days in the dark, one day in indirect light. Nice flavor and very filling. In any case, I have been using mostly jars up to now; I like the look of those trays... Thank you for this very useful post!
everyone should look into making their own sauerkraut (or kimchi for some adventure). It's dead simple. you can turn a cabbage into a delicious gut biome treat in a couple of days on your kitchen counter. hated the stuff when I was a kid. i just don't remember it tasting so good. goes very well with meat. the basic process is to break down the cells of the cabbage with salt by hand in a large mixing bowl, pack in a large glass / porcelain jar with a weight to hold the cabbage below the level of it's own liquid created when you mixed by hand with salt. that's it really. Add your favorite spices and you've got a tasty nutritional side dish in a couple of days. Lots of recipes online. highly recommend!!
I love that! Broccoli is supposedly second only to wheatgrass, health wise that is.
Wheatgrass requires a press but if I’m not mistaken 1oz of it=34 oz of a mix of fruits and vegetables. But that’s an old stat I was told at a health food store a while back, so grain of salt. It does make sense, when one drinks it, it feels like pure chlorophyll... IMHO, it’s the other “blood” of nature. But, broccoli sprout supposed to have anti carcinogens.
Thanks for that.
Beautiful! We have tried sprouting in Thailand (watercress) but in the ground and with our chickens/duck they had to be carefully covered with palm fronds. We had good results and some very edible salad greens for a few weeks. I remember sprouting wheat grass in a windowsill back from my LA days...it was all the rage back then. Generally we have too many established fruit trees here but it's great for a small area thanks for the tutorial!
Thank you. You've inspired in me an urge to go and find my Freshlife Automatic Sprouter, which is currently somewhere in my junk room, under a mountain of actual junk!
I started growing microgreens back in 2020, during our lockdown here in Australia. I have a couple of different seed trays, including your #2 (which indeed is a bit large for one planting for 1-2 people, but is otherwise quite good). I made my own out of some of those disposable mushroom trays, by putting a lot of holes in the bottom with a small soldering iron, and using an intact one as the drip tray. I line my trays with pieces of fibreglass insect screening cut to size, covered in a thin layer of coconut coir. These trays, and the insect screening, are resusable, and the coconut coir is cheap, easy, & retains water. I never bother with soaking the seeds. (Well, I did try it once, and it was a real pain to spread the wet seeds evenly. So that was that.)
My favourites are broccoli & red cabbage (I usually sow these in the same tray, half each, because they have similar sprouting & growing times), and most recently, peas (both snow peas and regular peas - the shoots are much the same, mild-flavoured and tender), black sunflower, buckwheat, and chard (a couple of mixes, eg rainbow chard, but all are good).
I don't like kale. Or kale sprouts. It's a matter of personal taste...
I've also tried bok choi (pak choi) and sorrel, & plan to repeat these as good eating salad greens.
Full grown bok choi is a bit strong for me, but the microgreens are lovely.
Recently, in Australia we have had heavy rain & flooding which have devastated our food-bowl areas, and lettuces have been either impossible to get, or very expensive.
So I was very, very glad to have my little bench of microgreens, which actually make a much nicer & easier substitute for lettuce!
I use hydroponic fertiliser rather than water, once the seeds have sprouted, and this does make them grow faster.
I've also tried growing some salad greens hydroponically, in Kratky buckets (google it!), which is a bit more work, though I have managed to grow basil very successfully, and some types of lettuce.
I live in sub-tropical Brisbane, where it is a bit warm for lettuce (especially in summer, when you most want it!)
So microgreens work really well for me, and the chard, pea sprouts, and sunflower produce enough bulk to make a decent salad.
Loved this, and the photos were a great addition. I've sprouted for years, but love the extra ideas you had that I hadn't used. I plan to revamp my own approach. Thanks!
Fabulous. I enjoy dandelions, nettles and other free herbs, mint, sage, especially, from the garden and countryside. The countryside and small pockets of greenery and nature offer all sorts of free organic fresh food. Significantly when we eat more naturally we need to eat much less. Much of the 'developed' world's problems, especially chronic diseases (which did not feature in mortality rates 150 years ago) and people's addictions and fundamental enslavement by banks etc., are because powerful wealthy corporations learnt how to leverage trauma and humans' evolved propensity to become addicted to sugars, etc., that served us well in the foraging hunter-gathering millennia (before 10-20,000 years ago, with the obvious exception of Native American Indians, now challenged enormously by obesity = metabolic syndrome and diabetes, because just a few generations ago all they ate was bison/buffalo), but since then basically our evolved susceptibility to food addiction has become our undoing. LiveWildLiveFree.org Also HealthResults.com and LowcarbFreshwell.co.uk are real examples of the new ground-upwards new health economies emerging (increasingly everywhere), and reversing the harms of the past centuries.
Off topic but relevant to the blog:
When I initially subscribed to RTE, all e-mail notices of new articles showed up in my gmail inbox. Now they are regularly showing up under the "promotions" tab, this forces me to go look for them and move them to the inbox. This also happened to Alex Berensen, and boriquagato. It appears lists are being made and certain information sources are being shuffled into invisibility via those lists.
Thank you for this! I have been using a sprouting lid and jar for years with broccoli sprouts. Recently they've not been doing too well. I may need to try the tray method.
great article, and very appropriate for the times.
We used to do sprouting of many of these same seeds, but after a couple months with things working OK, we started having mold problems, where the seeds would mold before they had sufficiently sprouted/grown shoots. Tried using dilute peroxide in the water to no avail. Finally gave up. It was a commercially made sprouter tray (plastic) that we were using, but I don't remember the brand. Have you ever had problems with mold, and if so, what did you do about it?
I forgot to mention, kelp powder can be used as a fertilizer and baking soda to prevent mold.
details: https://web.archive.org/web/20210620134835/https://homeguides.sfgate.com/grow-wheatgrass-kelp-powder-29685.html
(archive link, because now the URL leads to an article on pebbles for landscaping)
Growing food is the ultimate act of resistance and it's incredibly rewarding by so many measures including fresher taste that's unbeatable. It wouldn't be me without a reminder to choose organic and heirloom seeds rather than assume all seeds are equal. Also try to avoid Amazon that feeds Bezos and go straight to the source and support the many small farms directly. Every dollar is a vote so vote for the small, pure, local options. Organic Consumers has some tips & sources.
https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/tip-growing-organic-food-inside-your-home-year-round
ps try switching to brown, unbleached paper towels & skip the toxic load of bleach paper.