How's it going everyone. Kevin
from Epic Gardening here. Today we are growing a powerful
superfood called microgreens. Now you may have heard of these before
or you may be familiar with growing sprouts, which are a close
cousin to microgreens. But I think in today's video and the
process that we're going to go through, we're just going to talk about a
very bare bones, as you can see, very minimal equipment way to grow
a lot of nutritious greens at home. Now, you know, I started gardening
in an apartment and in a townhouse, places with almost no
light at all. And you know, this is one of the things that you
can grow no matter where you live. I mean you can grow them if you
have a big sprawling property, which I would be very jealous of, even
on my property now I don't have a ton, ton of space. But even if
you're an apartment dweller,
you can grow microgreens. So we have a bunch of
different types here. But before we really get into the nitty
gritty of how we're going to do this, I'm going to clear up probably a few
of the most common questions about microgreens in general. So
the first question would be, are microgreen seeds
different from normal seeds? And the answer is no. These
are the same exact species, the same exact plants you would
normally grow to their full size, except for the fact that we're planting
them much more densely than you normally would. Let's say you're
doing a broccoli green, there's no way you're going to be
planting thousands of broccoli seeds right next to each other if you're
going to grow them all the way up. But in a microgreen situation you would, and that's because you're harvesting
them very early on in their life cycle. Maybe eight to 11 days for broccoli, one of the longer ones would be
basil and even that's only 25 days. And we all know you can have basil that
goes throughout an entire summer if you're growing it to maturity. So that
is one of the most common questions. The second most common
question is where to get seeds. And so I like to get mine from True
Leaf Market or Everwilde Farms. Anywhere you can buy a bulk seed is going
to be a good idea. Because if you buy, for example, we have
some dun peas right here. If you were to have bought
those in seed packs, you'd be spending quite a bit of money
to actually cover an entire tray. So without further ado, we're going to address the basic
setup for how to grow microgreens. The soil, et cetera, and also some different techniques
based on the type of seed, including soaking and including the
density that you're going to plant those seeds. So the first thing to
talk about is the soil medium. Now I'm using a very standard potting
mix here. It's very fine grained, although you can grow microgreens
hydroponically if you want. Or you can grow them in
something like a coconut coir, which is an inert medium that
doesn't provide a lot of nutrition, but it does have kind of
the same textural qualities. Now what you really want in your soil or
whatever growing media you use is that it's fine grain. You do not want
a lot of these large particles. And for that reason, buying something like garden soil or even
some types of potting mix that have a lot of wood products in
them aren't a good idea. And that's because when you're planting, the larger the particles the harder it
is for those roots to kind of get around. And that's why you just want to avoid
that because you want nice even growth throughout the entire tray. You want to get as much as
you can of these microgreens. So what I like to do is
I take two cups of water, and this is unmoistened soil mix.
And I'll put the water in first. And what that's going to do is that's
going to help prevent any sort of mold issues because all the water is going
to wick upwards through the soil mix instead of downwards, top watering. And you can kind of get a lot of mold
and fungal issues if you do that, in my experience. And I've also noticed that one of the
biggest killers of new growers' microgreen trays is that fungal
problem, getting that mold, that sort of spidery looking
mold. And so what I'll do instead, as you're seeing me do here, is I will bottom water and
then I will fill from the top. And then what we'll do with our
spray bottle right over here is, once we've sewn our seeds we can go ahead
then and give it a light mist on the top. And that's really all it'll need until
you get some germination going on these trays. Now another little tip here
is when you're growing your micros, you don't want to fill the soil all the
way up to the brim because if you do that, you're going to have some issues
when it comes to harvesting. You know, you don't really need to wash
microgreens when you harvest them, provided you don't have any mold issues
and you know exactly how they grew. So the best way to prevent actually having
to wash is recessing your soil just a little bit. You know, maybe a quarter
inch, half inch below the surface. And then when you come through with
your scissors as you're cutting, you're not cutting off any dirt with
it or you're not pulling up any roots. So that's what I like to do and this
is just about as much as I would put in here. And you can see it's
just really nice, fine grained, not a lot of large particles. And I like
to smooth it out. And if you want to, you can even come through with
another tray and kind of give it just, just a quick little pat
just to lightly compress it. Don't go overboard here and it will
leave these little row patterns so you do want to re-smooth those out because
you don't want your seeds to clump. But just gives it that little
bit of compression to help
the seeds adhere to the soil once they actually start to
germinate. So that's it for our soil. Now we're going to go into a more simple
seed and talk about how to actually sow them. So here I have purple
top white globe turnip seed, which is in the Brassica family. And
you can see the seeds are quite small. So the smaller the seed generally the
less you'll need because they cover pretty well. And so I've got about one and a half
ounces right here and let's go ahead and sprinkle it on the surface. As you
sprinkle your microgreen seeds, I like to start from corner to corner
and kind of come through just like this and give it as even a
distribution as possible. You don't need to go overboard
and get really meticulous with it, but you just want to avoid large
pockets and clumps of seed. Which is why when we tamped the soil down
it was a good idea to smooth out those ridges. And that's why you want this soil to be
as smooth as possible when you start it out. So you can see I'm just evenly
distributing, just kind scattering these. And oftentimes you'll miss the corners
a little bit cause you're afraid of spilling seeds so you won't actually sow
on the corners. So just come through, make sure that you exhaust all the seeds
that you used and you're going to be in a really good spot. This looks like a pretty even distribution
for these turnips and I could even save some of this. I may have gone a
little over the one and a half ounces, probably closer to two. This looks
like really good spacing to me, but I am going to go ahead
and sprinkle the rest in here. And that's pretty much it for
sowing a small seed like turnips. Now that we have our seeds sown, we do have a little bit of water coming
up from the bottom of the tray if you remember, but we have to give them a little water
over the top because that does start to trigger the germination process. So
I like to give it a very light mist. There we go, of just normal
water, nothing too fancy. Make sure I get adequate coverage. It also kind of helps to adhere the seed
to the surface of the soil where once those roots starts to come out, they're actually going to start to
adhere themselves instead of growing in a weird pattern. So boom, we're just
going to hit it with some water. Not too crazy, but just
enough to get the surface wet. That's about all we'll
need. And then what I'll do, in this phase they don't need light. But remember most of the time you're
burying these seeds below the soil if you're growing them in a normal gardening
situation. We're not doing that here. And so what I like to do, and this
does two things. First of all, putting a tray on top like this
is going to block out light, which some seeds do prefer darkness
in order to germinate. In fact, I would say most seeds prefer
a bit of darkness to germinate. But it's also going to provide a little
bit of pressure that's going to simulate it being buried underneath the soil. Cause remember we just sowed
these on the surface there. So that's what I'm going to do. Now what you have to do
is just sit back and wait. Every day or two you can kind of check. Usually for something like
turnips in particular, this is going to take about
three days to start germinating, those roots to start going down. And then what you'll see is
you'll see these start to push up. And so the tray actually
will sort of rise on its own. And then what you'll see
is some yellowy-looking leaves. And they're yellow because they don't
have any ability to photosynthesize yet because they have not been exposed to
light. And that's completely normal. Don't think that your microgreens
are unhealthy because of that. So we're going to leave this one alone
and we're going to tackle a couple of these other seeds that have some more
interesting sowing and spacing and germination requirements. One type of seed that is really popular
to grow as a microgreen or even for juicing is wheat grass. One of the most popular ones you see
at juicing stores all over the place. And as you can see if we take
a look at this seed here, I'll see if I can bring it close for you. You can take a look at that seed and
it's much larger and also it's a bit more hard. The seed coat is a bit harder. And
so on the instructions on this packet, and just through my own experience, I know that you do want to soak this seed
in order to improve germination rates before you put it into the trays like
you just saw us do with those purple top globe turnips. So on the back here
it says, soak for eight to 12 hours, rinse and drain, then place in
a bowl or sprouting container. What I'll do is I will place in the tray
that we're growing our microgreens in or, in this case, our wheat
grass seeds. So in this case, what I like to do with my microgreens, if I know I'm growing a lot of
different soaking style types, is I'll create a couple
of different bowls, fill them with water and I'll dump these
in the bowl and then I'll set various timers so I know, you know,
when that period is done. Because you don't want
to soak them too long, otherwise too much water gets in
and in fact they can actually drown, um, in water. They can sort of start to
rot and drown. It's not what you want. You just want to get a little bit of
water through the seed hull to start speeding up that germination process
instead of just surface sowing these wheat seeds right on top without soaking them. You'll get spotty germination or the soil
will have to be really wet in order to make that work, which also
has its own issues. You know, you got that mold problem
that I was talking about. So we're going to go ahead and soak
these as well as some other varieties and we'll get right back to
planting. As I mentioned, our first one going in
will be our wheat grass. So we can just dump that in there. And in fact I'm going to use the rest of
this because I'm going to sow it pretty heavily. So we're going
to do all eight ounces, which I'll need to fill a little bit
more water in there. No problem though. Next we have dun peas. Peas are a fantastic and actually quite
valuable if you were to sell these at a market, uh, and also quite
nutritious and delicious microgreen. So dun peas you can tell are much smaller
than they end up once they're soaked and it's about five to
eight ounces per tray. So what I like to do is we'll just measure
out four ounces really quickly here. We'll do that and we'll do another four
cause I'll sow these pretty heavy as well. There we go. These soak for about six to eight
hours, maybe even up to eight to 12. These soak for four. And then we also have our final soaker
of the mix that we're going to be growing in this demonstration
is our sunflower seeds. So that will be right here. So these are black oil sunflower seeds, those are the best ones for microgreens. They have a bit of a
different look to them. There's hundreds and hundreds of
different types of sunflower seeds. So you can see these are all
black. They're not speckled, they don't have any white streaks. I'm going to use about eight
ounces of these as well. These soak for about four hours. And on
these the colder the water the better. Um, I'm just using water out of my
filter so it's a little bit chilled, so it'll be just fine. And we're going to do eight ounces of
these just cause I want to make sure I have some extra. And no
big deal if you have extra, you can always just start another tray
up. So we've got our things soaking. I'm gonna make sure, depress these
down, make sure they all get submerged. Nice and good. And we will be back when we go ahead
and have these all soaked so we can sow them. As you can see, we've
quite a few things soaking here. We've got our sunflowers,
our peas, our wheat grass, and actually one bonus one
that I just added, nasturtium. Nasturtium an exceptionally delicious
and prized vegetable for chefs. I mean you can go to a restaurant and
sell those and it's quite valuable, but also for yourself nutrition-wise very,
very advantageous to be eating those. So we've got our two cups of water. This here is something I'd recommend
just as a base layer, you know, for your microgreens and
for your nutrition. This
is just a simple salad mix. I think it's extremely valuable
to have that in your repertoire. You can get a basic mix, you can get a more spicy mix that's
a little bit more forward with those mustards and those
arugulas. But in general, I really do like to have a basic
salad mix ready at any time. Because remember you go to the
store and you buy, I don't know, one head of lettuce or certainly
if you were to buy microgreens, the price is out the
roof. And as you can see, we're not spending a whole lot on the
production of these microgreens. Your, your soil is not that expensive,
especially if you buy in bulk. Your seeds, certainly for these cheaper seeds,
aren't that expensive, right? Lettuce produces a ton of seeds
per plant. That's why the, the seed price itself is relatively cheap. I think the basic mix
is maybe if you buy it, if you start buying these
in the pound increments, you can get these for
$8 for a pound of seed. Which is more than enough
for 16 trays worth, which is much more than you're going to
want to consume in a week, certainly. And honestly, that'll feed
you for a month or more. And so we're talking $8 plus
some of the cost of the, the soil for quite a bit of
food for quite a long time. So we're just prepping the
seeds here and you know, figured I would go over a couple other
questions about microgreens that I often get. And so one thing that a lot of people
ask is does it matter if the soil is organic or does it matter if
the seeds are organic? Now, certainly that's a much deeper question
than I think is applicable to just a microgreen scenario. I mean, the question of organic
versus conventional is a
very hotly debated and hotly contested one. I find for
myself, if I can, I will. But I have to remember that I could also
grow these in a hydroponic environment where I'm just growing them
on like a coconut coir mat. That's technically not organic
certified. However, uh, in my worldview of how I think about
how that plant actually grows and the nutrition that's entering my body, then certainly I would view that as
an organic product just because I know exactly what I did to that plant. And so I would just caution you to
pay attention to the fact that organic certification is very different from
the method in which a plant is grown. You know, in organic produce,you
can still use pesticides, you can still use fertilizers
and you can still use, um, fungicides, herbicides, right? They just
have to be natural and not synthetic. So you know, sometimes I think people will make a
differentiation or a false dichotomy between something that's natural being
good and something that's synthetic being bad, right? Arsenic, completely
natural, naturally occurring compound, but you don't want to
eat it. And penicillin, certainly something that did not occur
in nature or certainly not in large amounts or had to be discovered and it
is completely a lifesaver for many people on this planet. So just
something to think about. But we're going to go ahead and
sow these, basic lettuce salad mix. So we've got some arugula in
here. We've got some romaine, we have some normal leaf lettuces and I
think we do have a little bit of a spicy flair with some of those mustards and
mizunas, which is just a tasty mix. I mean this is, this is really cool because you're
growing what you would buy at the store, you know, a chopped up mix of things. Just get different seeds in the same
packet and you're really good to go. So same principles apply here. Nothing
too fancy. We're just sprinkling. Nice and even. And that's going to be it for the
planting section of this presentation. We're going to go into the blackout
dome period or the germination period of these plants in just a sec. And so I hope you'll join me there
as I mist this off and cover it up. We are going to move on. So here we are in the
garden shed. As you can see, a vast array of microgreens are
sitting in here waiting to germinate. These are all the ones
that we've planted up. We've got all the way from
salad mix to chives to turnips, to some of the ones that we've soaked.
Our wheat grass, our nasturtiums, our sunflowers and our peas.
Now you might be wondering, why aren't the lights on? Well, the
plants don't really need light yet. Remember, they're germinating.
They're starting their life. Almost no seeds, at least
certainly not these ones, need light in order to germinate
and so we're going to cover them up. You can see we've got these trays on top, like I mentioned in the prior
sections of this presentation, but we also have a couple of trays on
top. Now, why would you do that? Well, what I've seen from my friends who are
commercial microgreen farmers at large scales now is putting a little bit
of added weight on top of the tray, forces those seeds to
struggle a little bit more, get really well established and
grow up nice and healthy and strong. And so when you start to see these
pop up, then you'll know, okay, it's time to take the tray
off and analyze and say, do we need to expose it to light? So what we're going to do is
patiently wait for a few days. I may check in once or twice over the
course of the germination process, but really now it's a waiting game. As long as you set all these trays
up correctly, the right soil, the right amount of water, the
right soaking or non-soaking, depending on the type of seed and
the right distribution of seeds, then you should be in a good
spot to just cross your fingers, wait and hope you have a good
germination in these trays. So we'll be back in a couple days.
Okay. It has been a few days, three days to be exact. I'm really curious to see what is going
on underneath these trays and we're going to talk about moving
into the next phase. But first we need to uncover the magic. Nasturtiums looking okay.
Sunflowers looking good. Wheat grass looking very good. Peas are coming up nicely. Our salad mix, we've got our chives a little slower, alliums a little bit slower and our
turnips are going absolutely crazy. So let's take a quick closer
look at these for a second. So here are the nasturtiams. You can
see they are starting to germinate, but they're just a bigger, harder
seed so they're a little bit slower. The sunflowers are doing
really nicely. The wheat grass, you can see it's yellow, but not a big deal because that's
because it's not been exposed to light. But this is going to grow up
rapidly once we expose it to light. Pea shoots are all coming up very
nicely. The salad mix, again, densely seeded, really nice
spacing and yellow. But again, that's because of no light. The chives we're going to keep under
cover still because they're only just now popping out some roots. So we
need to wait a little bit on that. And then we've got our turnips. So it is time now to talk about how to use light for these microgreens. So this is my favorite part
of growing microgreens. When you actually get to turn
the lights on, I don't know, something about the way that all the
different microgreens grow and look, it's just so fun to see
them growing like this. So let's talk about these lights. You can use a couple of
different lighting technologies. I really prefer LEDs or
sunlight if possible. You could certainly grow these outdoors. You do not need to grow them
in a shed like I'm doing here. But just for the purposes of this
presentation and for control, I find it to be quite a bit
easier to grow it under lights. You get to control every
single aspect of the growth. Certainly when I was a commercial
grower that was paramount. If you're a home grower, you could
be a little more laissez-faire. It doesn't really matter. But the thing that you really need
to think about is light placement. So this is a 440 watt I believe white LED. You don't need to use
something this extreme. It's just what I have on hand
and it has a nice footprint. Footprint means the area that the light
is cast over. I can cover one, two, three, four trays with this and I
could honestly even squeeze in a fifth. Down here you can see I've got a
different light. So this is a shop light, like a T5 grow light
shop light type of thing. Very similar to the lights
I have overhead right now. That is a fluorescent and so you
can also use fluorescent lights. The difference is the power draw on
an LED is going to be slightly more efficient given the same wattage and also
the T5 fluorescent is going to output a bit more heat. Neither of those should be a huge
deal when you're growing microgreens, but what I find is most
important is lighting placement. The closer you can get your light
to the canopy of your trays, the better. Microgreens are going
to be extremely light hungry. You don't want them to
stretch or etiolate, which is where they're sort
of going towards the sun, they're not getting enough sun and they
just get a little spindly and unhealthy. You'd much rather have them be
bushy, compact, nice and healthy. And that means trying to get this placed
as close as you can without overheating or burning the plants. So I could
afford to get this a little closer. Just for the purposes of the video,
I have it a little bit higher up. But you could get away
with a placement like this, so long as it's still covering the amount
of trays that you want to grow. Now, as far as timing, a lot of people will recommend 12 on
12 off, so sort of mimicking daylight. You can get away with up to 16 on and
eight off or you can get up to even 18 and six. The more light the better. You can watch your plants and make sure
that they're not having a bad reaction to too much light. Oftentimes, remember we're growing hundreds or even
thousands of seedlings in a single tray. It's a good idea to give
them a lot of light. So I have these both
set on the same timer. It comes on at about 7:00am and
it turns off at about 12 at night. So they're getting a
lot, a lot, a lot of sun. What we're going to do is we're going to
grow all of these for the next three to 10 days depending on the
variety. Like I said, the chives are going to
take a little longer, the nasturtiums are going
to take a little longer. But we're coming in and now is when
you do want to make sure and inspect. You want to make sure, hey, do
I have mold growth? If I do, you can hit it with a little
bit of grapefruit seed extract. You can hit it with a couple of
different things that help. Uh, grapefruit seed extract for little
mold spots I find is like a good spot treatment to help. You don't
have to scrap the whole tray, but if you do let it get out of control
then you do have to scrap the whole tray. So I would really
watch out for mold. You just want to make sure you can give
your trays a nice little lift and you'll get a sense for how much water that
soil is holding. If it feels light, give it a nice water and just make
sure that they are well-hydrated. Because remember you're growing thousands
of seeds in a small amount of soil. All those roots cumulatively are going
to suck up a lot of that moisture out of the soil, especially when they're getting a lot of
light and they're photosynthesizing and they're using a lot of
water in that process. So we are going to check in over the
course of the next few days and from there we will go ahead and move into the
next phase of microgreen growing. So here we are on the second day or I
guess the first full day of having light on these microgreens. You can see
they respond really quickly to light. They green up and they
grow very, very quickly. So we'll just take a quick look just so
you can get a sense of how they should start to look after you start
exposing them to light. First of all, let's check our nasturtiums. Definitely looks like covering them up
for a little bit longer has aided with germination, so they're
just a slower germinator. We're going to let them keep going. Our sunflowers have really started to
green up. You can see them start to reach, which is exactly what we
want. Eventually if you want, you can kind of brush off these seed
hulls and you can let them drop. And you want to wait until it's a little
bit thicker then you can just kind of run your hands over the top. The wheat grass is an extremely
prolific and quick grower. It's greened up and I think you
remember yesterday it was about here, so it's grown over an inch
over the last 16 to 18 hours. Kind of giving it a little pet here.
Our peas also starting to green up. Then our basic salad mix and our turnips
are greening up like crazy and growing like crazy as well. These ones will probably be
ready to harvest relatively soon. And then our chives, which
we have left under cover, the germination looks much better. You can see that it's just
a lot more white in here, which is indicative of a lot more root
hairs coming out and roots and taproots. So we'll leave that covered
until it pushes up above
this line and we're looking good. We'll come back in a couple
of days. Welcome back everyone. We are on day five or six. Things
are looking really good in here. As you can see the nasturtiums,
I have taken off the cover. We're going to take a closer
look at those in a second. Show you a couple of
mistakes that can happen. The sunflowers are looking really
good. You'll notice again on these, when we do a closeup, the seed hulls
are still on. When they grow up, we're going to want to kind of brush
them to make sure that those come off. The wheat grass is looking really
good and some of these microgreens are actually harvestable right now. So what I'm going to do is go through a
basic harvest process to show you guys exactly how to do it, to
prolong your shelf life, to make sure that there's no
contamination, all sorts of other things. It's all small fun little
tips, pretty much common sense. But I figured I might as
well cover it just in case. If it's your first time growing micros, you're going to have
these questions anyways. So here you can see the nasturtiums and
you can see that these ones on the edges really started to crawl out towards the
light because it's not a perfect seal when you put one of these
trays on top. And so the seeds, even these ones in here, they notice that light or photons are
coming in from here and they said, you know what, let me go over there. So that's why you see this pattern
of them crawling towards the light. Now that the light is actually
coming from a downward source, they're actually going to start
straightening up and growing normally, but I could have stood to take the cover
off a little bit sooner just to prevent that. Now you've got your sunflowers,
nice dark green color here, looking beautiful. Like I said, you can kind of come through and
do this and all of the seed hulls, or at least most of them,
will start to come off, which helps you with
your cleaning process. Now the wheat grass is
ready for its first cut. It's about four to five inches long. We can come through and we'll cut it
right about there and that'll be a really good spot to start harvesting and maybe
even making a little wheat grass juice with this. Pea shoots
are looking really nice. You can see based on the placement
of both of these lights, if you look, you can see all of these pea shoots are
slightly curving this way and that's because this light source is actually
stronger than this one and it's actually closer than this one too. So you can see these plants really do
respond to a healthy dose of light. And if you are working in, you know, interesting conditions where you don't
quite have the exact lighting set up you would want, you can take this
and maybe rotate it over here, move this one over here and you can
kind of play musical chairs to make sure that everything's getting the right
amount of light for enough time. Basic lettuce salad mix, you can start to see the
differentiation in some of the seeds, some darker leaf varieties as well as
some larger, more broad-leaved varieties. As we move over to the turnips, they're looking really good and they're
also ready for their first cut or actually their only cut. You can see
they're about three to four inches long, so it's time to cut those guys. And then finally our chives have
come off of their blackout dome. And so they actually smell really, really
nice. They're starting to green up. And what you'll notice with the chive
seeds are they're sort of folded in half. That first leaf structure to
come out is folded in half. And you can see this one right
here, it's kind of folded. As soon as it starts
getting exposed to light, that fold unfolds and it'll go
boop. And so it'll look like they, they grow double overnight, but in fact they're already that long
and they just need to unfurl themselves towards the light. So pretty soon
we're going to see these chives. I'd like to harvest them when
they're about right there. Here we are with our wheat
grass. It's time to harvest. And actually most of the time
when I'm growing microgreens, I wouldn't use something
like grass shears. But we're growing wheat grass
so it makes sense to use them. Now what you want to do is, we did have the soil a
little bit below the top, but also wheat grass is one
that you can cut and come again. So I try to cut a little bit higher so
as not to remove every single blade of grass that is coming out
of that center of the stem. And so I would cut maybe right
around this mark right about there. So I'm just coming through,
I'm grabbing the top, cutting and just putting it in my
bowl here. Pretty simple process. Just come through with
my blades, grab this, cut. There we go. And we're good. And so wheat grass you can probably get
two or three cuts out of wheat grass, which is really nice. It's
unlike many microgreens, many microgreens you really
can't. So uh, this is why, I mean first of all the seeds are really
cheap and second of all you can get three cuts out of it. You can mix it into any sort of juice
and it's just a really good addition. So it's a staple microgreen for me.
If I was growing them, you know, for straight up nutrition I
would definitely be having
wheat grass pretty much all the time. And you don't need
to be too precise about your cuts. Just come on through, keep on cutting. And let's make short work of this. Get a little messy. It's all good. Now we have our tray. So we've got a ton of wheat
grass microgreens here, and we can also just give
this tray a deep water. We definitely hurt these plants a
little bit. Give it a deep water, throw it back under the lights, let
it grow up again and cut it. But, what are we going to do
with all this wheat grass? This is not the best juicer for the
job, but it is the only juicer I have. So I'm going to throw a bunch of
this wheat grass through the top. It sort of masticates and chews it, spits out the fiber right here and
the juice will drop down right here. So let's go ahead and see
if we get a good result. [inaudible] [inaudible] And here we go. It's not a lot, but it's
maybe a couple ounces of wheat grass, super potent. And then what I like to do since the
taste of this straight up is not that enjoyable to me, you can certainly just shoot it
down and that's completely fine. What I like to do is I
mix in another juice. So I found some kumquats and
turned them into a juice. These as well are also super tart, so you can't really have
this on its own either. Usually I just dilute this with
water. I'm going to mix the two. We'll give that a little bit of a
taste test. Honestly, the color, color change is kind of
cool too. So shake that up. Both of these should temper each other
out and then we'll have a nice little juice. But you can do whatever
you want with wheat grass juice. I mean you could mix it into other
juices, throw it into a smoothie. You could make a ton of it and then
freeze it and then use it later. A lot of different things you can
do. So let's go ahead. Cheers. Thanks for watching guys. That's so much better. Yeah,
the tartness of the kumquat, maybe mix some orange juice into it.
Okay. We're back. It's day seven. The wheat grass has gone through
two cuts already actually. Probably going to get only one more out
of it. But the rest of the microgreens, besides the chives, are ready to go. So let's talk about harvesting in general. We'll talk about storing and then we'll
even talk about how to use some of these microgreens. Plenty of ways. Your
imagination is kind of the limit, but I kind of have my pet ways of using
them so I'll share those with you guys. You can see, compared to how
the nasturtiums started out, all the stems have
started to straighten up. They've gone straight towards the light
and you've got these beautiful classic nasturtium leaves. Honestly, I
can even smell them from here. But this is going to be a super
delicious nutritious tray. We could let this grow a
little bit longer of course, but we'll probably harvest a few. Then we have our sunflowers and these are, some of these are pushed down just
because I just watered this tray. But you can see most of the seed hulls
are off and again you can just keep doing this to get them off. But a nice hefty
looking tray here. Like I mentioned, the wheat grass going through its third
cut now and it grows maybe an inch every day. So it's crazy. Pea
shoots are looking incredible, they are looking so nice. Uh, I mean this is like easily
over pound of pea shoots. You can see on the individual pea you've
got the seed leaves down here or no, actually that's a true leaf. Then
there's some secondary leaves showing. You also have some tendrils coming
out. So these are very, very mature. Our basic salad mix is looking amazing. Probably four to six ounces on
this tray right now. The turnips, which I just also watered down,
we've got a huge hefty amount. And then our chives are, I mean
they could use another day or two, so I'm probably going to wait on the
chives. But chives, fantastic addition. And I actually just eat these seed
hulls too. I don't really mind. And so I don't try to
get too many of them off. Okay. We are here at day 10, maybe 11, I think it's day 11. And as you can
see we've got quite a bit of growth. In fact, we may even have let some
of these go a little bit too long, which we can talk about. But first of
all, let's go over each of these crops. So the nasturtiums have grown up quite
considerably. You're going to get, I mean, almost a grocery bag full of
nasturtiums off of just this right here. We have our sunflowers in the
back. Now these are the ones that, I don't know if these grew
exactly like I would have liked. Sometimes you get a
tray that is like this, so it's kind of good that I have this
for illustrative purposes. But you know, just some of them died a little bit back
here and they just aren't quite as tall as I would like. That being said, they're still going to be
really nutritious and delicious. So if you get a tray that's like this, sometimes you just kind of don't luck
out or maybe you didn't water exactly perfectly. You get something like
that going on. Not the biggest deal. We can still harvest this. We can still
eat this. Next we have our pea shoots. Now, this is a tray that did
really, really well. Look at this. You've got easily over a pound
of delicious pea shoots. Now, I personally will, well, you know what? I'll tell you exactly what I
like to do with these afterwards. Let's roll through the rest of them
first. We have our basic salad mix, which is looking very healthy and our
turnips, which were the fastest grower. I probably could have stood to harvest
these a little bit earlier than I did because they're growing so tall, they're
actually starting to fall a little bit. That's not a big deal. It just makes
harvesting a little bit harder. So kind of nice to actually showcase some
of the issues you might run into as it comes to harvest. You can get trays
that maybe look a little bit stunted. You may have planted a little too dense.
You may have not watered quite enough. Some little pathogen may have
actually hit parts of the tray, not the biggest deal. You can certainly
just give them a nice wash, harvest, eat. This one may have gone a little
long. Just harvest it a little earlier. That's one way to prevent this.
Chives over here looking really good. They're getting right around
to that harvestable level. So certainly the longest crop. But if you've ever had fresh
chive microgreens you'll
know it is worth the wait. So as far as what I like
to do for harvesting. For the larger trays, I'll
actually use grass shears. There's a lot of different things you
can use. You can use normal scissors, you can use micro-tip
pruners, whatever you want. But if we're talking about
something like a pea shoot, I could come in and just chop like
this. Same within the nasturtiums. For, you know, the lettuce salad mix
or for the turnips for example, I find that it's better to use micro-tips
or like smaller shears cause then you can just grab and cut as you need. You can leave the rest living on the tray
and then boom you'll have it as fresh as you can possibly get it.
For things like chives, again, those micro-tips are really good cause
chives will grow for quite a while and most of us aren't using tons and tons
of chives all at the same time. Okay. So we're here and I figured what I'd do
is just harvest some of the pea shoots, one of the easier ones to harvest with
these grass shears. But like I said, you can use a lot of different cutting
instruments. Really is up to you. I usually like to get a big bowl and
then I will harvest outside and bring it into the kitchen. And we'll go through a
little bit of the storage process. But, you know, just come through and clip about
an inch above the soil surface. So you're not taking up any
dirt. This is completely clean, fresh microgreens that you
do not have to wash. I would, I would caution that advice though, I'm
not, you know, a food safety expert. I just personally do not wash mine cause
I know how I grew them and I know that I'm not getting any dirt and I know that
there's no pathogens or anything like that. So I don't wash them. I would not say that that's a
general recommendation though. But we just come on through. We're
going to take this whole tray out. And so I would say if you're a
first time microgreen grower, the ones that I showcase that would
be good recommendations for you, would be these pea shoots. I would say
that any of these greens-based ones, turnips, the basic salad mixes or anything
in Brassica family in fact - kale, kohlrabi, collards, broccoli, cauliflower. Any of those would be really good options
because they all grow relatively the same way. I would recommend sunflowers. If you like nasturtiums I would
highly recommend growing those. And other things that are good. Things that I didn't showcase
in this one would be a radish. Radishes are a very popular microgreen
that a lot of people like to grow and they're highly nutritious and also in
fact maybe even easier than any of the ones I've shown so far. Just
because the seed's large, you're not having to deal with any
seed issues and it just germinates very quickly and grows vigorously. So I
would say definitely give radish a try. But you can see we are going to
come on through, just keep on going. Almost done here. Another thing I would say is one of the
most common questions I get is can you keep regrowing? And the
answer is typically no. So for things besides a grass like
you saw us do with wheat grass, yeah, you could of course regrow wheat grass
because that's how that plant itself grows. Um, but for something like a
pea shoot, when you're cutting off everything and there's nothing
left, so we have our root, we have our seed and we
have the beginning of a pea. You might be able to get a regrowth here, but it's very unlikely and honestly the
soil is kind of spent anyways because we have sucked up quite a
bit of nutrition. In fact, let me show you the matting
of the soil. See that? So a lot of this soil's nutrition has
kind of been used at this point because they've, they've been here
for 12 to 14 days now. So in my experience it's best
to just start a new tray. What do you do with these? That's
the next question people will ask. I honestly will throw
these into my worm bin if, if you're doing vermicomposting, very
good green material for your worms. Also a little bit of extra. You could consider this soil
kind of like a bedding material. This will go really good into
your hot compost bin as well. And I just like to recycle my soil,
my microgreen soil into my compost, and then I can actually mix the compost
back into the next microgreen tray. Or I can just throw it out
in my actual edible garden. But we've got a hefty amount
of pea microgreens here, so let's just go ahead into the kitchen
and we'll talk about storing them really quickly. For something like pea microgreens, what I like to do is I
have a mesh crisper bag. And other microgreens I actually
would enclose in a full, you know, maybe a Ziploc freezer bag
or something like that. I find that the pea microgreens are
hardy enough to be able to survive in something like a mesh bag. So I'll just pack them in and I'll
put them in a relatively high humidity crisper setting just so
that they store pretty long. But these you'll want to use in the next
three to five days anyways because you know it's best to use your stuff as fresh
as possible from both a just a taste perspective, freshest perspective and just a
nutrient density perspective as well. This plant is still alive so it's
slowly dying as soon as you cut it. So we're just going to stuff
this stuff in there. You can, you don't have to be particular
about how densely you pack it. I find sometimes a little bit denser
means that it does preserve a little bit better. But that's pretty much it. And then when you're going to
use something like pea shoots, what I like to do is I'll just take them
on a cast iron and just throw them in the skillet with some garlic. You know you could do like
some soy sauce and like that, you get a little bit of
an Asian flavor going on. But this is the way I like
to store pea microgreens. So thank you so much for watching
the microgreens presentation. I really hope that it's inspired you to
grow at least some of these microgreens and enjoy those flavors and those
nutrients in your food every single day. Very easy to do. If you have any
questions at all. I am Kevin. My company is called Epic Gardening, so you can find me on
YouTube as Epic Gardening. There's a daily podcast called the Epic
Gardening podcast, Instagram, Facebook, and of course the website where there
are super in depth articles. In fact, the only thing that's not called Epic
Gardening is the book that I just came out with. So if you're looking for a more in-depth
guide into urban gardening options for beginners, if you're trying to grow some
more of your own food in a very simple, practical way, and maybe you are somewhat
limited on space or maybe you're not, there's something in here
for everyone. In fact, there even is an entire section on my
in-depth process for growing microgreens themselves. So there's
quite a bit in here. And you can find that on Amazon
or wherever books are sold. Again, it's called Field Guide
to Urban Gardening. So thank you so much for checking out
my presentation on the superfood summit, and until next time, good luck in
the garden and keep on growing.
This guy has a good YouTube channel.
Where do regular greens start and microgreens stop? Those look fairly grown out. Good vid though
He doesnโt really talk about watering much. How much do you water when the tray feels light weight?
This guy has some great content. I watch a lot of "On The Grow" too. They do a lot of experiments that help you determine what works and what doesn't. Check them out!
I like how he really drills down into each process instead just an overview and then wild claims that you can make thousands a week. That and he's really good in front of a camera.
I just started learning about mircogreen and his videos have been a huge help!
How about temperature advise?