Growing Sprouts? Yes!
It’s funny how, when looking back on parts of our lives, things seem to make a lot more sense than they did at the time. Decisions that may have felt random or periods of time when I felt I was just wandering all of sudden feel purposeful and well-directed in hindsight. This is exactly how I feel about my decision to follow a path studying plant science, food systems and food in general. I’m still early in my “career,” but even so I can clearly see the moments that shaped my view of the soil as sacred, mother nature as magical, and our planet as a most precious home. The foundation of my interests began while spending long hours in the garden with my dad at our childhood home.
I grew up in a house with a big garden in Portland, Oregon. My dad is a kooky professor with encyclopedic knowledge of German history, baseball, and plants. When he isn’t teaching, you can be guaranteed to find him in the garden. He grows flowers that make the neighbors green with envy, and asparagus that would grow wild late in the summer, creating a magical forest for a young child like me. It was in that garden that I discovered my dad as a person with deep interests, and his knowledge opened new worlds for me. I became comfortable with plants, dirt, and bugs, and learned that there is nothing more rewarding than a sprouting seed. As a child the garden was a magical world of discovery. As an adult, the garden is a sanctuary full of memories that I can return to with my dad.
The following is the first of a few articles that my dad wrote, and we worked on together. These essays are a personal ode to him, from my perspective, and an opportunity to pass on some knowledge from his. Back when I was in school, he was always the best late-night proofreader for procrastinated essays, so it is only natural that he would join our Grounded Grub community in this next chapter of my life.
Let’s talk about sprouts, folks. Sprouts are the media darling for gardeners and healthy consumers—and rightfully so! Few other foods can compete in terms of ease of growth and nutritional value. A pound of seed can create an astounding 10 to 15 pounds of food. Sprouts contain vitamins, minerals, proteins and antioxidants in concentrations higher than almost any other food. And, because sprouts are eaten as real food, the body more readily absorbs the nutrients than compared to nutritional supplements. One smaller commercial grower even went so far as to claim, “If you were stuck on a desert island, you could survive on speckled pea sprouts.”
And if that weren’t enough, sprouts are simply delicious! Because we can coax almost any seed to sprout, the variety of flavors are as diverse as the dozens of seed varieties a grower can produce—beans, grains, flowers, and spices. It’s what seeds do. There are literally no seeds, besides poisonous purple nightshade and fox-glove, that somebody hasn’t tried to sprout. Although poisonous sprouts might be interesting… (That’s a joke, like the drinking bleach thing, remember!?)
Sprouts first entered into the lexicon of the main-stream American diet in the late 1960’s, however, they have deep historical roots in Asian cuisine. Within ten years, sprouts had found their way onto sandwiches and salad bars from coast to coast. In fact, there are places that have embraced sprouts so passionately that anything but an alfalfa or mung-bean sprout raises an eyebrow. And yet, sprouts march on, especially because of small producers and farmers’ markets that introduce new creative varieties weekly. It seems taste, as much as nutrition, is driving innovation in sprouts.
Let’s step back and take a breath after gushing over sprouts and their unfettered benefits. Both commercially sourced fresh sprouts and growing sprouts at home can be fraught with difficulties.
Starting with fresh sprouts grown right at home, home-grown sprouts are clearly the freshest, safest, and cheapest method of sourcing sprouts, and can often yield the tastiest product! However, unless you’re some plant-crazed hipster with an ag-degree from Cornell...growing sprouts at home is often more difficult than portrayed. Each and every species of seed sprout has its own specific growing conditions and its own set of potential problems.
The term “fresh-spouts” is really a generalized term used to describe two entirely different sets of vegetables. Sprouted-seed is easy and fun to produce at home on a small scale, and can easily be done in an array of used jars. Sprouted-seeds are sprouts grown without soil and are eaten whole—root, seed and shoot. Growing green-sprouts (or tray-sprouts) in soil, on the other hand, is both time intensive and labor intensive as they require weekly pruning and harvesting. Sprouted wheat and wheat grass best illustrate the difference between the two types of sprouts. Sprouted wheat is simply the sprouted kernel of wheat, eaten raw in a salad or toasted in bread. Wheat-grass on the other hand is a sprout that is grown in a sterile soil medium and harvested by cutting the green vegetable from the mat of developed root structures. Growing green-sprouts is really cultivating micro-greens, not sprouts. In turn, this more complicated process introduces a whole set of issues connected to humidity, temperature, air circulation, and the danger of food-borne illness. Simply put, when you add a soil medium into the equation, you are taking on a much larger endeavor, as they demand a different level of care. Growing green-sprouts in soil year-round is certainly in your wheelhouse, but is it realistic? (And who the hell really likes wheat-grass anyway! I’ve downed too many double shots of wheat-grass juice back in the day just to prove my organic chops. It wasn’t worth it.) Personally, even having 40 years of seed sprouting under my belt, I stick to sprouted seed not grown in soil. But what the hell, if you’re feeling adventurous go for it with green-sprouts! There is certainly more than enough material online to help you be successful, and you will learn a lot from trial and error. Just do not get overconfident with experts telling you how easy it is!
When it comes to the commercial side of this, one can find small and locally-grown organic sprouts available in most supermarkets, alongside corporate sprouts. However, commercially-grow sprouts are water, energy, and labor intensive. To grow properly, all types of sprouts must be constantly wet and constantly rinsed with clean, potable water to ward off foodborne disease. To this end, the FDA requires that commercially-grown sprouts maintain “an unbroken cold chain”—meaning that the product must remain refrigerated constantly from the moment of harvest until landing in the consumer’s cart. For many, these environmental costs alone make commercially-grown sprouts unsustainable and the profit margins dictate that the work requires poorly paid, long hours.
My humble recommendation is to collect a bunch of larger mason jars, replace the inner-lids with circles of window screen, available at any hardware store (in the old days, we simply punched holes in any metal lid with a hammer and nail), and start with seed-sprouts. Rinse the dry seed thoroughly, as most contamination is in the seed stock. Don’t soak the seeds too long, they have to stay continuously wet anyway. Germinating seed creates an incredible amount of heat, so you need to rinse, drain, and repeat at least twice a day. Don’t germinate too much seed at once—a teaspoon of seed goes a long way! The germination times vary for different seeds, but soon you’ll have sprouts ready to harvest on your own countertop. Rinse well, and enjoy! If you have never sprouted seeds before, start with alfalfa, mung bean, or chickpeas, or take it out-of-the-box with things like fennel or caraway. Just get sprouting!
