Growing Microgreens on Paper Towels!? - Coco Coir vs Paper Towel

how's it going everyone today we're gonna be drawing on paper towels for the first time ever in our space and comparing that to a regular grown medium so stay tuned for the video so in the past of paper towels we always ran into some kind of issue with stagnant water or the crop just being devastated and not germinating well and I'm pretty happy to see that we've actually come this far alright guys so one of the most common questions that we get around growing microgreens is can you use paper towels to grow microgreens successfully and the answer is yes but it does come with its own set of challenges so first thing with growing microgreens do you really want to have good water retention you want these seeds to germinate well because that's really the most challenging part of microgreens in my opinion is getting these seeds to germinate well and then keeping them hydrated throughout their entire growth so that they're very happy plants and give you a nice happy end product so with paper towels the main challenge is yes they do absorb water but they don't really retain a whole lot especially when compared to something like a soil or a cocoa Kawara where there is probably I would guess maybe 2 cups or more of water retained in this versus what might be several teaspoons of water actually held within these paper towels so the second main challenge with paper towels is their ability to drive their radicals which is the first route that comes out of them in through the medium and down to the bottom of the trail where they're going to be receiving their water whenever you use mediums like cocoa kawar you could see it's loose so these roots are able just kind of push their way through and weave through all this cocoa and make their way down through the mesh screen at the bottom or the little slots if you have them so that they can get down to the water so what I'm going to be doing with this grow is doing our best to get these guys to germinate as best as we can and see if we get some successful grows happening with some paper towels now the paper towel that I used is I believe like a 2 ply paper towel you can see it right here how its kind of splitting apart from itself so it is a 2 ply so in the past I have actually tried using one ply recycled paper towels and they did a decent job but we actually ended up running into issues with what I kind of talked about where the radicals just couldn't penetrate through the medium because they were 1 ply and I think they were just way too densely woven and also the second thing that we ran into was that there was too much water stagnant at the bottom and we ended up just tossing out those paper towel ones because that bad smell just leads to usually mould and disease and we just didn't want that in our grow space so I have laid down one sheet this is only one layer thick of paper towels on both of these trays I think you guys kind of saw that in the beginning though at the edges it was a little bit too long so I kind of folded it over on the edges and it's gonna be interesting to see if these ones on the edge actually grow better because there is two layers of that double ply paper towel which means there's gonna be more water retention in the sides so I'm excited to see if maybe we get better germination over there so something that I am gonna do with one of these trays for the paper towels just to see is I'm gonna put a layer of paper towel actually over it because like I said the main challenge with these guys is getting them to germinate and these paper towels just don't retain enough water so I think that if I put another layer on top and mist it then we're gonna get much better humidity in there and we should be able to get more of these radishes to germinate so I'm gonna lay this one right over on this and this one will just kind of leave and we'll just compare these two throughout this grow so I'm gonna kind of do my best to flop this over so you can see the paper towels don't really want to fit within these trays and they kind of fight you but if you get them a little bit wet they're gonna be much easier to work with so now see you whenever I lay this over it actually stays laid over and I could push this down into the corners and that's gonna do a good job kind of holding this so one thing to be cautious of when using a paper towel over top is that your radical or your roots can actually grow into the top one as well and whenever you go to remove that after germination you could potentially pull out some of that crop and have some going upwards instead of downwards so I'm just gonna give this a decent watering here to the point where I kind of see the seeds showing through and that looks like a good level of saturation for this tray I'm gonna go ahead and hit this second paper towel tray here again I'm just kind of waiting till it changes color a little bit and I could see the transparency happening from the water and that should be solid on that one and then they give these Kovac or a decent watering here see this is the advantage of cocoa core is I can give it a good amount of water and it's not going to negatively affect my crop this is actually going to help it out it's gonna hold a lot of that water and it's gonna keep it very humid during this germination process but using cocoa core like this does cost a little bit more I mean a soil or a cocoa like this is gonna cost maybe thirty to seventy eight cents depending on what kind of cocoa or soil you're using per tray versus a paper towel where it's going to be pennies to use those paper towels what I'm going to do is kind of mix up the stacking order here so I'm gonna have my double paper towel on bottom I'm gonna put a cocoa tray on top of it take my single paper towel one put it right here and then my other cocoa on top of it the reason I do this is because the bottom tray is going to receive more weight than the top tray so if I just kind of randomize the stacking order a little bit I hope that we can get a little bit more even germination throughout this tray all right so I got me a tray to set on top I'm just gonna kind of push that down a little bit and I'm gonna take a 15-pound paver and just plop that right on top I'm gonna take this and put it on the shelf and I will see you guys tomorrow when it's time to take a look at the germination and let's see hopefully if we get some of those paper towels germinating so I'll see you then all right guys these paper towels and cocoa have been germinating now for one day so let's get the top remove and take a peak of the growth so I will say that we got a little overzealous and we accidentally watered this tray I was hoping to water with you guys on camera but we were doing a lot of filming this morning and we didn't want everything to dry out so we hit everything with a bit of water so all these have been watered this morning and it's about lunchtime now so let's take a look at the growth here so we got one cocoa tray right here make sure these are all sticking just a little bit so what I do is like a slide it and knock it down into the tray below and then come on give me that last tray give it to me and nothing sticking on that one okay so taking a look at all of these so again we came out last night we miss it all of these and they were looking great this morning when we had to miss them everything was looking great the top of this double paper towel one was a little bit dry but that was about it everything else is doing super solid so what you can see is all these radicals are beginning to push out of everything you can see that happening on the cocoa and we see actually some pretty solid germination coming off of the paper towel trays as well and something I want to do real quick it's a little weird is I want to smell it make sure there's no smell of like stagnant water or anything like that and I'm not noticing anything on that paper towel tray or on this paper towel tray either so something I want to do on this one because it is a little hard to see I mean you kind of see the radicals popping through underneath there but let's just kind of pull this back and take a peek here so the germination looks pretty solid on all of these I'm actually really happy with the germination on this tray and again the radicals are just beginning to push out so they haven't really begun to dive down into the paper towels but you can see they are actually diving down into the cocoa kawar so one thing I want to take a peek out real quick is lifting up this tray and seeing if we need these roots are sure to come through so none of the radicals have really made it through the paper towel if they aren't digging through and there's like one or two that are starting to dig down into the paper towels but again this is really really early in the growth so we're not going to see a whole lot of action happening what I'm going to do is I'm gonna get all these stack back up water them again tonight and I'll see you guys tomorrow for another update we are on day two of this paper towel germination trial and grow trial so let's take a look at our growth here I'm removing our top lid and you see some of these seeds just kind of stick to it at this point I'm going to knock these off because they haven't drove their radicals down into the medium so I'm just gonna knock those guys onto the ground that way they don't end up just dying in our canopy later down the line okay here's what's gonna be interesting because the tray below it is the paper towel so you could see how many of these are not driving their radicals down and through this medium this is a very large percentage loss for this crop and you can see just the difference between these two like a lot of these guys are now standing up on this cocoa because they were able to drive their radicals down into the medium versus these paper towels down here yes we were able to get them German to germinate so I'm gonna do my best to kind of what I'm a there's not a whole lot of options here I'm gonna take it I must slide it and knock those into the tray it's about the only option I got for these paper towels so again Coco quar see how easy that was I mean we lost maybe three one two three four we lost four or five six we lost six little seeds there that's really not bad that's pretty expected to have a very very minor loss on some of those seeds but compared to the paper towels it's pretty extreme and this one shouldn't have any sticking because we have a layer in between so it looks like having a top layer paper towel is going to be the way to go for this but let's take a look here at our growth I'm gonna peel back this top layer on this paper towel one and hopefully and here's the issue with this is these are now kind of growing into this top this top paper towel versus down into the bottom medium like I want it to oh man so this is why I stick to mediums like cocoa or actual grow mats they're do a good job yeah see that's the same thing we're just losing a lot of this crop here because it's just sticking well and I've messed up our paper towel so at this point I'm gonna have to remove these because it seems like the crops is trying to grow into it so the top paper towel is coming off today it only helped us for one day and I'm not seeing much stronger germination than the other tray so I think that top paper towel is kind of useless on this tray okay so let's take a look and compare all of these so again like I said with cocoa or a soil like medium or an actual grill mat that's made to have its radical distributing to it you're just gonna see a lot better growth let's take a look at these cocoa trays you can see how these radicals have rounded and push themselves down into this cocoa medium and I'll just kinda give you an example if I pull this out well I just pulled off the tip of that little guy you can see how this root is just really in there and see how it's drove itself down into that medium and that's branching out we kind of sacrificed one just to show you guys there but this is why I like things like cocoa and soil now let's take a look at these paper towel trays so I can contact my finger and just brush these I would say 95% of these actually aren't even growing into the paper towels or even going through it we've got yeah we've got maybe 10 let's count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 let's close in 11 11 of these radicals pushing through this paper towel so we have a very very very low percentage of these guys actually being able to get through this paper towel taking a look at our coco huge difference here a lot of these radicals have driven way down and they are looking very happy branching out lots of root hairs on them so I feel like let's take a look at this last one too so same thing this is the double paper towel one and same thing I mean a lot of these I can just kind of pick up and lift I mean I could just barely guarantee if I just kind of shake this tray yeah see look these guys aren't even driven down into the paper now they're sitting on top and they don't know how to get to that medium and that's because it's woven too densely perhaps or they just don't maybe it's not the correct pH it could be something that they use within the paper towel maybe a bleaching or something like that that they don't like and they don't want to grow into so there's a lot of reasons why this could potentially not be driving itself down into the paper towels okay well that's about it for the paper towels today what I've got to do today is we're gonna put this in to wait for one more day because with radishes we do three days with wait in one day of blackout and I doubt that these paper towels are you gonna even going to make it to the growing stage because as you guys see there's like nothing actually pushing itself through that paper towel and if I bottom water this we're just gonna get stagnant water nothing's gonna be absorbed up into those plants because their root hairs aren't actually growing into anything a lot of them are just kind of floating on the surface of this paper towel so I'm gonna get all these stacked up I'm gonna water the Coco ones they look like they need a little bit of a mist and I'm gonna be careful and very lightly mist the paper towels because I can see that they're very quite saturated still so that's what I may be doing today and I'll see you guys tomorrow for another update all right we're on day three of this paper towel versus cocoa core germination trial and today is the last day that there was going to be weight on top and we're actually supposed to move this crop into black out as you can see a lot of this radish on this cocoa core our tray is stood up mostly we've removed 95 I would say percent of the seed holes so it's time for these going to black out now let's check out our paper towel right below this and see how these are looking so we have a lot less sticking compared to yesterday which is pretty nice I'm gonna try and knock off those few that we're still kind of hanging on and it's a pretty big difference there and growth between all these so let me get the last paper towel one out let's take a look at it again I'm just gonna knock all the seed holes off and scoot this over so there is a huge difference in growth here so number one I will say we got great germination on all these trays all of them germinated they were able to break out seed holes and start growing now the main difference here is between germination and actually getting rooted there is a massive difference as you can see on these co-co-co our trays a lot of this crop is actually starting to stand up this drove it's right goes down into the medium and this is actually getting ready for bottom watering let's take a look at the roots here and the roots look super happy and compared to our paper towel trays which I thought I just noticed a little bit of a smell so I think there's a getting a bit of a stagnant smell to some of these because they probably aren't growing that well and we're starting to get some water just kind of residing on the bottom of this so we need to be careful about how much water we're giving these paper towel ones so again looking at these paper towels you can see how all this is just kind of laying flat there's a huge difference between the growth of the cocoa kawar and the paper towels because it's cocoa they were able to stand up get rooted like I said in the paper towel ones there's kind of growing on the surface and trying to get their roots and radicals down into that paper towel medium and they're just really struggling to do so when I take a look at the roots on these paper towel trees and we've got more roots coming through so it's a lot better it's definitely an improvement over yesterday where there was maybe two or three roots kind of popping through I think I said about six or seven so again we got some popping through but compared to our cocoa it's a huge huge huge difference and just overall growth wise I could tell that I'm probably two three days behind on growth on these two trays the paper towel ones these are not ready to go into blackouts honestly it really kind of bad growth and I don't know that I'm gonna be able to continue growing this so we got like one here that could potentially actually start growing I mean there's a few that are I could feel they're starting to kind of get locked down into that medium you know what we might try to grow these out just because they are kind of locking themselves down now into that medium I just don't know that these are ready for blackout yet okay so what I'm going to do today is the these two need to go into black on I mean really this radish is pretty tall I can actually introduce these and delight today these co-co-co are ones but what I need to do is probably I'm gonna put these two paper towel ones into black out so we can hopefully get those just to stand up a little bit more before they go into the light so I'm gonna put two Coco ones into no take that back what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put everything into black out since I need to put the paper towel ones into black out I'm gonna put the Coco ones in a black out just to keep this test consistent and I will see you guys tomorrow for another update what are those alright guys we're on day 4 of this pip Patel vs. cocoa trial and all of these trades just came out of blackout so let's go ahead and take a look at of all the growth tip you guys will notice on these cocoa trays we got super solid growth here these guys are ready for introduction into the light today so we're going to be doing that now these paper towel trays actually have begun to stunt stand up a little bit as you can see they're starting to arch a little bit so the radicals and the roots are finally beginning to I guess kind of integrate themselves into those paper towels so that's pretty exciting but we're still seeing some really poor germination and kind of growth along most of this tray and comparing these trays side by side there is a pretty massive difference between the cocoa groups and the paper towel groups so since today these cocoa trays need to go into the light we are going to keep everything consistent the paper towel traits are going to go into the light as well since we're putting everything into light you guys know the rules whenever we put things into the light in our grow space we like to add nutrient water to the bottom of them and help them to really begin to grow and flourish so I'm gonna go ahead and do both of that now we'll see you guys tomorrow for another update and hopefully these paper towels can just like I'm praying for like a Hail Mary here that they're just gonna shoot up and somehow beat these so I'll see you guys tomorrow into the night with you adding this water now to the paper towels I got to be really careful not to overwater this so I'm gonna do I just poured about half a cup of water into there so you can see there's a little bit of water on the bottom but it's not actually enough to like Poole because I guarantee you a lot of that's still gonna be there tonight and tomorrow the Mater for you and some water for you all right we're on day five of this experiment and everything's looking pretty dang different as you guys can see so both the cocoa trays are looking really great this tray right here did dry out a little bit so I added a little bit more water to it and I just got to keep monitoring this to make sure I gave it sufficient water because I did notice it drying out as for the other cocoa tray it's like an extremely solid as well but the two paper towels are actually starting to kind of stand up a little bit and catch up but overall I mean you guys can see how different the growth is here between all these trays how short these little paper towel ones are compared to the cocoa ones looking at this paper towel one over here I'm noticing a ton of red and the stems which is really cool because it gives it a nice coloration I'm sure it effects the flavor as well but that's generally a sign of stress so I think that's probably because it was dehydrated not getting sufficient water something like that I mean a lot of the crop isn't falling over which is the sign of it drying out kind of like we saw in that cocoa tray but overall I mean it is showing some kind of stress and I think that's just because it's yeah I don't think it's the best medium to be used period all the cocoa trays I'm not seeing any of that reddening in the stem and I think that's because they're not getting stressed out as much as the paper towel trays had been stressed what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna get all these put back on the shelf and we get some water added to them and I will see you guys I probably just do like a few panning shots over the next few days because I think at this point we can kind of see what the difference is and I'll see you guys in a few days once it's time to harvest alright we're on day 6 of this trial between cocoa and paper towels and both of the cocoa trays look like they're about one day away from harvest so we are going to be harvesting those trays tomorrow I'm starting to see true leaves and I'm gonna let them develop a little bit more for one day the paper towel trays are beginning to stand up just a little bit and hopefully we can get a decent harvest weight out of them tomorrow so I'll see you guys then for harvest we have made it all the way to day age of this grow with the paper towels and I'm pretty stoked because I have never gotten paper towels to successfully grow this long and our gross space and I think we're actually going to get a pretty but decent harvest off of all of these so in the past of paper towels we always ran into some kind of issue with stagnant water or the crop just being devastated and not germinating well and I'm pretty happy to see that we've actually come this far so what we need to do today is we're going to harvest all of these because everything is basically ready for harvest let's go ahead and take a quick look at all of these trays side by side and see what kind of differences there are between all these groups so starting over here on our first cocoa tray the growth on this is really solid I love the color of the cotyledons the height is really nice and we are beginning to see some true leaves happening which means this is time to harvest this crop as for the overall appearance at the crop it's really nice it's beginning to fall over because it is quite tall personally I would have preferred to harvest this yesterday but things got a little crazy in our grow space and we had too many other videos and I didn't have a chance to actually film this so we let this go one day longer than I would have loved all right and onto our paper towel trade now this is our first paper towel tray and this looks really nice I'm really happy with the height on this tray and the growth on the cotyledons looks really nice the coloration is a little interesting compared to the first tray as you guys will see there's a lot of yellowing kind of happening towards the inner sides of that cotyledon personally I think it's a very fun coloration but to me this is usually some kind of deficiency or some kind of stressor that you start begin to see colorations like this there are some really dark Cod aleene's mixed entities so there is a very healthy growth mixed with these potentially slightly unhealthy Cod aleene's the uniformity of this growth is really nice and overall I'm very very happy with this tray on to the second Coco kawar group again it's very similar to our first one in that I'm seeing a lot of really nice growth here that the height is very very very tall it's actually a little bit taller than I would prefer again like the first one but the color on the cotyledons is great and I am beginning to see true leaves so it is time to harvest this and overall at first glance this looks like a very healthy crop on to our second paper towel tray again this is very comparable to the first one in that we are seeing that yellowing happening on some of these Cod aleene's I kind of like it it's a very cool fading color but again that is some kind of sign of deficiency or just a stressor that happened throughout this grow we lose about I would say maybe a tenth of this tray I don't know the exact proportion of that but we did lose a good chunk to poor germination here in the back but overall I think that we're going to be able to get a good harvest off of that tray so what I need to do now that we have done a quick overview of all these trays side-by-side is I'm going to harvest each one of these trays individually and I will probably film the paper-towel ones the coca ones happen very very easily but the paper-towel ones are usually a struggle because there's not a lot of medium for those roots to drive into and whenever you go to cut if your knife isn't incredibly sharp and you're not very very careful you're gonna end up ripping out a lot of those roots I'll go ahead and try to film all these quickly on camera for you guys so let me get set up to get harvested and I'll see you guys in just a second just pain okay so harvesting a cocoa tray is pretty straightforward you can see that the medium will pull out a little bit if I kind of yank on it but overall you're not gonna kind of struggle with the medium pulling itself out let's go ahead and get this part of it stood so one thing that is a little bit challenging about harvesting on cocoa is that you will get some of that grow medium on the actual stems which usually means that you're gonna have to wash this product off a little bit but it is something that slightly messes with the appearance of your crop compared to say whenever we go to harvest a paper towel we shouldn't have any issues with the grow medium being attached to the stem of this product like this okay so you can see how quickly that happened for that tray I'm gonna go ahead and jot down my weight and I'll see you guys in just a second when it's time to harvest the paper towels okay now we are on to our first paper towel tray so this is a little bit harder because it is a tiny bit shorter but it's actually that kind of height that I prefer with radish so I'm excited about that no it's just so you can see I'm already kind of pulling up that medium but it's moving pretty good and as for stuff I don't really like the appearance of some of this right here on the edge but we'll talk about that yes in just a mom so this is actually happening a lot easier than I thought I guess those roots are we're able to drive themselves down pretty good into that mesh tray now if you use the slotted tray I think this would be very different the mesh allows those roots to kind of pop through and that gives you a little bit of grip compared to the slotted ones where you have a lot less roots actually penetrating down and through those so I'm pretty happy with this actually so far you can see how there's no medium on this so that's actually really quite nice compared to the Coco Coco are so the corners is where it seems to try to pull up the most that's for the middle that was all very very easy to harvest and you see we pulled a route all the way through and it's pretty easy just kind of flip off right there if you got a sharp enough knife okay so that was fairly easy we got a few stragglers here I'm gonna try get these cleaned up and I'm gonna get a harvest weight going and I'm just gonna quickly do the other two and not show you guys or I'll just do a quick time-lapse on the other two I have finished harvesting all four the trays and before we move any further if you guys wouldn't mind go ahead and smash that thumbs up button because it really does help out with the YouTube algorithm and sharing our videos if you guys haven't already please be sure to click that subscribe button and the notification bells that way you guys get notified anytime we release new videos now let's get into the actual results so first before I talk about harvest weight so let's go ahead and take a look at the growing medium side-by-side so I pulled one of the paper towel trays and one of the co-co-co are trays so we kind of take a look here at the growth now when I talk about the Coco first because that's the most common one taking a look at this you can see that it's very healthy growth all across this I'm not seeing any signs of mold or decay or anything like that you can see how rooted this was if I just kind of take a corner and I kind of tug on it a little bit on some of these leftover chopped ones you can see how that medium is just basically all held together by these roots also taking a look at these roots real quick on the cocoa we have a very healthy root structure it's very minimal but still very healthy now as for the paper towel again looking at all of it it does look really healthy but I do notice quite a bit just small radishes that didn't really have the chance to take off because of the poor germination and I think that if we get a little bit of practice we can get a little bit better at that but you can see this whole corner back here it was just it we just lost as for the medium itself again I can kind of tug on this and you can see it does pull out of the paper towel a lot easier so it doesn't lift as easy as the cocoa does but if I kind of pull on the corner of this paper towel we were able to get a lot of these roots to go through and it's not as extensive as the cocoa kawar side because I think they did have a little trouble penetrating through that but still really healthy nonetheless alright so that's it for a quick look at the medium side-by-side and I do have to say that it's gonna be pretty easy to compost these paper towel ones and the cocoa kawar is gonna just take up a lot more space in the paper towels will so I think that's pretty cool too and if you guys are curious to what we do with our mediums after we harvest all we simply do is I just kind of like I showed you we pull up a corner or will flip the tray over and we'll just knock this straight into our compost let it break down and then we will later we use that in our gardens BAM okay so now let's discuss our harvest wait let me bust out my handy dandy phone that took notes on so for the cocoa part raised let's start with those the first tray gave us 410 grams and the second tray gave us 435 grams so I'd say we average somewhere around 420 grams now as for the paper towel trays the first tray gave us 292 grams and the second tray gave us 210 grams again it was a lot lower because I think of the poor germination and the slower kind of start on those two trays but overall that's a very healthy harvest weight I think if we'd given them and another day or two we could have gotten a higher harvest weight so let me get this out of my way and let's take a look at all these side-by-side so this isn't the same order that I showed you guys this is coco coir paper towel coco coir paper towel as I showed you guys whenever we first took a look at all these side-by-side so as for appearance after harvest I will say the coco coir trays are the tallest of the group that's not necessarily a good thing because a lot of stem doesn't really translate into a better product it's just a lot more stem which is why we potentially got higher harvest weights as for the crop itself it does look pretty healthy I'm not seeing a whole lot of undergrowth there is a tiny little bit of under that just didn't germinate well but overall I'm very happy with it as for the first paper towel tray there is very very little undergrowth and I think it's because it was so drastic between those that didn't germinate well just basically stayed at the very very bottom and died off versus those that were actually actually able to germinate shot up pretty tall the height on these are pretty good I mean compared to the cocoa it's actually pretty similar it's I would say it's just a little bit shorter but overall very nice-looking as for the health of the crop it looks really nice and overall I'm very very happy with that so something that also to that kind of talked about during harvest is you'll get a little bit of cocoa generally on the stems of the cocoa trays but I'm not really seeing that on these I mean here you can see a tiny tiny little bit here it's really hard to see but on the paper towels trays you're not gonna have any of that because there's no kind of soil like medium that's gonna get attached to your crop so a second coco coir tray again really healthy really happy cada liens are nice and overall I'm very happy with this growth and then the second paper towel tray was the shorter of the two again though it's a very nice-looking crop if I just saw this by itself I would say that there's a slight sign of a deficiency or sadness because of that kind of ombre that's happening between the lighter color and the darker color on the cotyledons overall though I think it's very nice and if I saw it by itself I would think it was a decent looking crop so the winner for appearance is pretty tough I love the height on the paper towels I wish I mean I could what I could technically do is just chop off a little bit on these co-co-co are trays on the stems and I think I'd be very very happy with that so I'm gonna say winner of appearance is the cocoa kawar trays just because I can chop off a little bit that stem and I had that nice really dark green that I'm looking for it and I caught it lead-ins now let's do a blind taste test well let me get this on first okay so Mandy if you would please don't grab the whole group of the radish but point out which ones now if you guys remember it's cocoa paper towel cocoa paper towel I'm not sure if my finger was in the right location but that's the general gist of it Mandy feel just point out which group you're choosing and give me just a little bit because radishes can tend to be spicier and I don't want to like kill my palate so the cool thing is all the Heights were pretty similar so it's hard to tell based off its just feeling at which group it could be Wow okay very spicy I didn't love the flavor I mean it's like wow really really really really intense slight bitterness to it overall the rash flavor is very very strong aftertaste is nice the initial taste is just like kind of a kick in the mouth okay not bad a little bit of bitterness I think but overall nice man was that spicy let me do this I'm going to try to blindly find my coffee down here ah there we go and use copy to kind cleanse the palate because radish is very intense on flavor much better okay round do hmm okay so still really spicy very strong radish flavor probably chews up nicely overall I think it was really nice very spicy around 3:00 oh god that was like the first one okay so I had that huge initial kick like the first group did very spicy very radish eat it's a really nice product and overall you know I'm happy with it it's very intense though it's very very intense so that would be something I use in really low quantity but it does pack a lot of flavor and the initial kick is really hardcore like that first group was my nose it is hmm thank God so knives and tens is that first group so was it groups one three super intense groups two and four so far don't have that initial like kick in the mouth but equally I think it's pretty spicy so I think all their actual spiciness is pretty close I would say groups two and four a little bit less spicy than groups one in three it's just like man do you want to kick in the mouth or do you want something that creeps up and stays spicy so I'm gonna get this pulled off and back to the light oh my gosh Kamandi if you would please point out which groups they were so that was number one okay - okay interesting okay so it wasn't what I expected I figured like both the paper towels were one and three or something like that so definitely was a mix of groups that had the kick and the more mild intro to the flavor so you didn't see my paper towels or cocoa were specific on which ones had to kick in the mouth versus the creeping flavor it seemed to just kind of be potentially where it was positioned on the shelves and I should have probably marked that down so that we could have known that fact 1 & 3 were closer to the fan so maybe being closer to that fan somehow I don't know I'm not really seeing what could have caused the differences in it the flavors there because those are both very similar and appearance taste and we're there position on the shelf I thought maybe was the lighting or something like that but okay so overall I don't think there was an absolute winner on flavor I think that they all tasted really good across the board those kicks in the mouth were very very intense but as for the spiciness it was very nice across all of these and it's just that's what you're gonna get from radish if you do it right you're gonna get a lot of kick out of it there are ways to make it more mild I think if you reduce them at the light intensity and things like that so overall again very happy with flavors not a winner in the group I think that they're all pretty much even okay so now it is time for me to choose an overall winner for this entire experiment and I'm going to have to go with the cocoa kawar trays just because it was a lot easier to handle they weren't as prone to drying out we did get solid germination across all of them and in fact they are probably a day or two ahead and their growth compared to the paper towel trays now the the reason the paper towels again didn't win is because they were just a little bit slower in their germination a little bit more care had to go into them to keep them thriving and they also didn't have that weird slight coloration change to them but I think if we give ourselves a few more practice runs with paper towels we might be able to actually pull off some pretty similar growth between the paper towel and the cocoa and I think it is a very promising medium the reason I say it's very promising is that was probably one penny worth of paper towels which is very very cheap when you're using that as a medium for example portray on Rococo kawar we're looking at about seventy eight cents per tray so I mean you're gonna take our average costs I think it's probably about a buck fifty for a ten twenty tray using cocoa kawar so you take 78 cents out of that you just put a penny we're underneath a dollar to grow a tray of radish that's pretty huge I was a little bit of a paper towel hater but I think I'm starting to get on board with the potential of what paper towels and growing on them can do I think that what we need to do is figure out what type or brand of paper towel actually allows the best root penetration and so I think I'm gonna start doing some more tests I'm gonna go find some more that don't look as densely woven or some that do look densely woven and let's see if we can find some maybe that absorbed water better or something like that so I think I'm going to be playing around with paper towels a lot more in the future because I do see the potential and for those of you that I kind of shut down in the past and be like all paper towels are bad I think I'm actually starting to kind of jump on that train and saying okay I think there's a lot of potential here if we just figure out which one's work best what I'll be doing also is also trying out different crops on paper towels to see if we can get some successful growers would say like crops like amaranth which are a lot more delicate and a lot harder to get those radicals to drive into mediums Burks is something that grows like really aggressive like radish that can push its radical generally through mediums very easily that's all for today I hope that you guys enjoyed this video if you did please give us a thumbs up if you disliked this video give us a thumbs down if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the section below and we'll do our best to get those answered for you as soon as we possibly can our Instagram and our Facebook are both out on the grill farms and our website is net thank you so much keep on believing and have a great day [Music] [Music]

Channel: On The Grow

Views: 324,312

Rating: 4.9297419 out of 5

Keywords: Hydroponics, Microgreens, Microgreen, Urban Farming, Experiment, Grow your own, How to Grow, How to grow microgreens, Agriculture, Bootstrap Farmer, On the grow, Sprout, Microgreens at home, Microgreens growing, Microgreens business, Microgreens farm, Microgreens Tutorial, Microgreens Growing Tutorial, How to grow microgreens from start to finish, How to grow microgreens indoors, How to grow microgreens at home, Microgreens on paper towels, How to grow microgreens without soil

Id: UbjlCBXP7gQ

Length: 38min 11sec (2291 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020