Last month, if you remember, I talked to you about growing microgreens for use in the home kitchen. This talk will be about growing sprouts. Microgreens usually take one to three weeks, depending on the type of plant you're growing, and you usually grow them in soil media.
For sprouts, you just grow things in water. It's a whole lot easier. This is a great thing for salads or on sandwiches and also in cooked dishes. You can sprout in the dark even so it really works great.
But to safely sprout various seeds, the first thing you need to do is sterilize the seeds. This is pretty important because there's a lot of bacteria that may be on there and we don't want to get you sick.
So sterilize them with like two tablespoons of vinegar and a cup of water and then soak the seeds in that for eight to 10 minutes. Then just rinse the seed off and put it in clean water and skim off any seeds that float, then make sure that you use a sterilized sprouting container.
I've used a quart mason jar in the past and that works really good. Otherwise you can use a little bit of bleach water and like three tablespoons per quart of water and soak that jar for five minutes or so. Place the seeds in the container and then rinse them with tap water two to three times per day and drain them well. That's all you need to do and you've got sprouts.
So what things should you use try to sprout? Try onion, maybe alfalfa or mung bean. Try broccoli seeds and radishes. Garbanzo beans were great, mustard seeds too. The best thing to do when you're purchasing these seeds though is make sure you purchase untreated seeds so they don't have any chemical residues on them.
Happy sprouting, and we'll see you next month.
