Take a look at most prepper storage foods and you notice a few things. Lots of chili and soups. Pasta and rice everywhere you look. Nothing fresh and very little green. Oh wait, what’s that? A handful of fresh, green sprouts, bursting with vitamins and minerals, waking up that bowl of chili! Making your own sprouts is a cheap and easy way to provide a fresh and nutritious supplement to your diet at any time of year.
Salty and I talk over the hows and whys of sprouts in this podcast:
Here are some radish seeds, just breaking out. In three days, those tiny nibs will be more than two inches tall with a couple of tender green leaves and ready to eat.
Why sprouts?
Sprouts are not just a hippie fad food, good people. They really are bursting with nutrition. You see, the plant’s intent was to supply it’s little offspring with everything they would need to make a start in the world by packing it all into those little seeds. There’s more minerals per ounce in plant seed than any other food I know.
Then, once the plant embryo is awakened by the water and starts to grow, the first thing it does is manufacture itself a load of vitamins and other essential nutrients. There’s very few calories in sprouts, but there’s a whole boatload of micronutrients.
There’s also green, and a bit of crunch, and a fresh taste. Your mileage may vary, but many people find those very welcome after a bit on a ‘prepper food’ diet.
How to produce sprouts
Production is dead easy. Key points: Soak the seeds in water for the first half day or so. After that, keep the sprouts moist but not in standing water for about a week. I like them in a single layer; I’ve seen other people do them in jars. It’s best but not critical to keep them mostly in the dark until the last day, then let them get a little sun. Then eat.
I use sprouting trays Salty bought for me online. I like them because they can be easily sprayed with water (twice a day) and the excess drains through, keeping the seeds moist but not wet. They’re also stackable, so take minimal space. (Here’s a link to the trays I like. We have no financial interest involved.)
Here you see the design of the trays (holes in the bottom small enough to stop the seeds but not water; good air flow, stackable).
What does success look like?
In one to three days after the soak, you’ll see the first roots and shoots pop out of the seeds. The shoots will gain size with surprising speed. The first two little leaves (cotyledons) that were pre-set in the seed come out. That’s when you put the sprouts in better light (but not direct strong sun rays) for a day to green up those little leaves.
They’re ready to eat when the first two leaves are out. They don’t have a great shelf life once ready to eat. A week in the refrigerator is their best window; less if it’s warmer.
With a tray like this, the roots grow through the holes and can be rubbed off during each watering. That makes the eating experience nicer; although the roots are pretty tender they’re not the best part.
Choosing what to sprout
The picture above shows an experiment. I wondered why sprouting seeds were sold separate from garden seeds, so I tried some garden seed. I also wondered why I never saw spinach as a sprouting seed, so I tried some of them. The garden radishes (right side tray) are sprouting beautifully; the spinach (left tray) are only now starting to show the occasional seed breaking. I don’t think spinach has the high percentage of sprouting success you want for growing sprouts.
Different plants have very different sprout flavors. Salty favors very mild and fine sprouts, so I grow a lot of alfalfa. Radish and broccoli make medium-thick, almost spicy sprouts. Bean sprouts are the largest and thickest, with the most crunch. They’re not as flavorful as the radish.
You can buy combo packets with various kinds of seeds, but there’s a caveat. Seeds take different times to mature to eatable sprouts. As a general trend, the smallest seeds give good eating in 5-7 days; bigger seeds longer. Beans are slowest at about ten days. That means if your combo packet has a variety of seed sizes, they’re not all going to mature at the same time.
A couple of my favorites: Alfalfa is a quick, mild, high producer. Broccoli has a little more heft and punch.
Getting seeds to sprout
On one hand, sprouting seeds seem awfully expensive. That bag of alfalfa sprouts was $7.50. On the other hand, it only takes two tablespoons of seed to get more than a quart of alfalfa sprouts. It ends up being very cost-effective nutrition.
You might note my seed packs in the picture are organic. Normally I’m not worried about organic or not, but they do put a lot of fungicide on some seeds meant for garden planting. That’s one reason to buy the sprouting kind. (I got my seed from the experiment from people who don’t use a bunch of fungicide.)
It’s also pretty darned easy to save your own seed for sprouting through the winter. Just let a few plants go to seed and leave them until the pods are dry. Put a big bowl underneath and mush the dried pods with your hands to produce a rain of seeds and pod bits into the bowl. The seeds go to the bottom. The chaff on top can be pulled off by hand or just blown away. Being a blowhard has served me well! This worked great with medium sized seeds like broccoli and radish. Alfalfa (very tiny seed) I just buy; and beans I don’t care to sprout.
Storage for seeds for sprouts
These seeds have to be live. The good news is, most plants drop their seeds expecting them to get snowed on before spring. Sprouting seeds have to be kept fairly dry (or they’ll start sprouting) but not vigorously dried (or they’ll die). Just sealing the seeds in a ziplock bag has worked fine for me for a year or two. The sprouting efficiency went down between years one and two, but was still ok.
I have every reason to expect that seeds frozen for several years would be fine, but haven’t tried it yet. I’ll probably try it this spring; we mean to plant one of our ‘prepper garden’ seeds-in-a-can we’ve had for a few years as an experiment. I’ll try a few as sprouts just to see and report on the results later.
In sum
Making sprouts is really easy. It’s also a whole lot of nutrition for the cost and effort. Sprouts make a great accent or mini-salad to liven up ‘prepper food’. Two thumbs up from me!
I’m a fan of mung bean sprouts. I have two sets of jar lids designed for sprouting, with 3 different hole sizes in the lid depending on how large the seeds you’re using are. I just screw them onto a quart sized canning jar and invert the jar at a slight angle to let it both drain and breathe after each rinsing (morning and night.) Best thing with mung bean sprouting is that you don’t need light…so I put the sprouting jar in a dark corner of the kitchen. I try to keep a couple of pounds of mung beans around so if I need some fresh topper for a meal I can have it in a few days. So far I’ve put them on sandwiches and salads, and once I just sprinkled some apple cider vinegar on the sprouts to have as a side salad.
Some of my local chinese restaurants use mung bean sprouts in their dishes, so I can always toss some into some fried rice towards the end of cooking to add some freshness and crunch. Guess I should start another batch of sprouts so I can try that with the next batch of rice we make. Fried rice is always a fun way to use up leftover meat and whatever veggies are on hand – usually carrots, peas and onion, but sometimes I’ll add water chestnuts for crunch, and thanks to this article I’ll try the mung bean sprouts. 🙂
But to be frank when you started your podcast I thought you might talk about indoor gardening as well. I have two Aerogardens that I use during the fall, winter and early spring to keep fresh lettuce and either herbs or cherry tomatoes growing until I can get the outside garden started again. Of course that requires that we still have electricity, so during a grid-down event I’ll be relying on the mung bean sprouts for freshness in my diet, but some events won’t take the grid down, so I can have more options for fresh food in the colder months. And no reason folks on a budget couldn’t do something similar with pots or trays kept inside and some grow lights. And to increase yields, a bit of mylar draped around the area will reflect the light back into the plants. I’ve used that on my Aerogarden for years and it make quite a difference when growing cherry tomatoes.
Always nice to have a touch of fresh in the winter. Thanks for the article!
Thanks for the good additions! We’ve wanted to do some indoor gardening, but it’s not a big house and it hasn’t found a spot. Love the mylar idea; might use that behind the one windowsill area we use to start garden seeds in early spring.
I’ve always wanted to try an Aerogarden but alas, the closest we come to indoor gardening is starting seeds.
Yeah, the full sized units are pricey, but hard to beat for convenience. Of course they have some smaller units that I think are more to get people hooked on the concept and make them crave the larger units. I certainly crave their new AeroGarden Farm units, but I don’t have the budget or room for one and my cats are too active to make it safe to have anything on the floor or even on a regular table….
Proof the world is not flat: Cats have not pushed everything off the edge.