How to grow Sunflower Sprouts

Looking out at your garden in mid February, with nighttime temperatures still dipping down into the teens, any thoughts of fresh greens may seem futile. Fear not!! Bring your garden inside, and grow some micro-greens. You can enjoy the fresh taste of just-picked produce year around.

You might be familiar with those salad sprout (such as alfalfa or bean), which are sprouted in a jar or other special containers without soil, but micro greens are grown in containers with potting soil or another growing medium.

With a few simple steps and a couple of readily available items, you can gaze out over your micro-farm on the kitchen table and be proud of the farmer you have become.

Sunflower sprouts are baby sunflowers. They make an inexpensive and tasty nutritional addition to any meal or smoothie. We use them on sandwiches and toppings for soup. We stuff them in veggie burritos and tacos or simply toss them in with other baby greens for an amazing salad.

Fresh, crunchy, and slightly nutty in flavor they can be grown indoors all year round, providing lovely fresh greens in the depths of winter.

They can also be grown outdoors when the weather is warm. Sunflower greens are one of the best things you can add to your diet to improve your overall health and well being. They are delicious, nutritious, they make for a beautiful presentation and they are fun and super easy to grow.

Sunflower greens are a nutritional powerhouse packed with vitamins A, B complex, D, and E; they also contain minerals including calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and zinc. In addition to these vitamins and minerals, sunflower greens are a rich source of lecithin which helps break down fatty acids into an easily digestible water soluble form, and chlorophyll which benefits many functions within the body, including building blood supply, revitalizing tissue, calming inflammation, activating enzymes, and deodorizing the body.

Sunflower greens are also a fantastic source of protein and can easily supply you with all the protein your body can use! You can harvest a new crop every 7 to 8 days.

A great source for purchasing your in-shell sunflower seeds is http://sproutpeople.org/. Their site is  loaded with a huge assortment of seeds, sprouting supplies and packed with tons of info on the subject.

Growing Sunflower Sprouts

This is how I grow sunflower sprouts. You can usually always find a tray or two growing at our place . They're so delicious, I have found myself snacking on them straight from the tray.

1. Soak a cup of unhulled sunflower seeds for 8 hours or overnight, and then rinse and drain them. Since the sunflower seeds float, I place the seeds in a mason jar and fill it with water all the way to the top. Then I place the lid and flip the jar over for the day. You can try whatever works for you, just be sure the seeds are fully submerged.
2. Prepare a seed tray, or other container, with a good quality compost. I like to make sure the compost is nice and moist (but not flooded), so that I don't have to disturb the seeds for a couple of days,  Make sure that you gently push the compost right into the corners of the tray. Pour the soaked seeds into the middle of the tray, and gently spread them out evenly. It's fine if they touch, but try not to overlap them. Using the second tray or your hands, gently press the seeds into the soil.

3. Cover the seeds with a second tray, and leave in a warm place. This second tray helps keep the moisture in and the light out. I like to put some compost into the second (top) tray to add a little weight so that the little sprouts have something to push against. Its some pretty cool plant physics. They push up so the roots can grow down. Equal and opposite reaction. I am always amazed how strong they are. After only a few days, the young sprouts have lifted the upper tray nearly 2 inches.

4. Once this has happened, remove the top tray. The sprouts with be white and ready for some  photosynthesis action. Let them see the light!!!

5. Check daily to see if they need watering. Water gently, and keep out of direct sunlight. I grow our greens under a couple of full spectrum fluorescent lights but any sunny area in your house will do. Just remember, no direct sunlight. The little guys can get sunburned.  They will need more water if the temperature's hot, and less if it's cool. Over watering makes them prone to mold and rot, while under watering may mean they die of thirst, and will certainly stunt them.

6. They are ready to harvest when their smooth seed leaves are large and green, and the second hairier leaves have not yet grown. Most of the husks will have fallen off the sprouts by this point, but you will need to pull a few off by hand.

The two trays above are ready for harvesting. The one on the left is sunflowers, the right, buckwheat  ( grown using the same method).  You could  leave them for another day or two, which would give most of the smaller sprouts time to shed their husks and open their seed leaves.

To harvest the sprouts, cut off near the base with sharp clean scissors, rinse them in cold water to remove any traces of soil, and spin dry in a salad spinner.

Enjoy fresh in your salad or green smoothie, or store in an airtight container in the fridge, where they will keep fresh for 5-7 days, providing they're almost dry, and all the husks have been removed.

Happy sprouting. Now get out there and micro-farm!!!

A Seedy Litte Daydream

They began arriving around mid December.  They were filling the mailbox like sardines in their tins, and they came with promises. Promises of "BIGGER", "EXTREMELY PRODUCTIVE", "THE SWEETEST YOU'VE EVER TASTED", "STUNNING AND UNIQUE", ...... They promised the stuff of dreams. What, you may ask, are these bearers of glad tidings?  Well, it was the arrival of the upcoming years' seed catalogs. HURRAY!!!

While much of the garden lies sleeping under its blanket of snow, these brightly printed, high gloss pages come with yet another promise, the promise of spring. That time of year which prompts the sun to begin it's yearly pilgrimage, its journey to climb, higher and higher, step by blazing step, skyward.
(Alright, I know that it's really the other way around, but I like giving praise to springtime whenever possible).

Lying in bed at night and trying to sleep, I envision a garden painted with all the colors of a rainbow, purple eggplant, their limbs straining under the load of ripening fruits, yellow heirloom summer squash, winding and crawling their way up wooden trellises, sun orange, fist sized tomatoes as sweet as candy, and ruby red peppers that Goldilocks would appreciate - not too hot, not too mild, but just right..... For a gardener, at least THIS gardener, these technicolor dreams are far better than visions of sugar plums dancing in ones head.

With springtime, the days get progressively longer.  The growing warmth of the sun heats up the earth, and the ground, which has been frozen and nearly impenetrable, now begins to thaw. The soil is once again becoming workable. This anticipation of springtime brings a few extra beats of excitement to my heart.  

With these lengthening daylight hours comes the raking in of a new layer of fresh compost, the trimming of trees and roses and various other chores around the garden that didn't happen last fall.


......OK, OK, I know it's just now February and I live in a zone 5 climate.... spring is still a few months away, but there is nothing wrong with daydreaming.
 
So back to the seeds. Perhaps one of the most exciting tasks is that of taking those glorious catalogs and all their promises and creating a list of the fruits and vegetables that I see filling this years garden. Then taking that list and sending off the orders and waiting, maybe not so patiently, for the packets of promise to arrive. Those little seeds, those capsules of genetic information that will hopefully, with a little bit of nurturing and a lot of letting them 'do their thing', fill the garden with new life this spring.

For this years garden, I have decided to grow, almost exclusively, heirloom varieties. Heirlooms are those seed that have been open-pollinated meaning that unlike hybrids, seeds you collect from one year will produce plants with most of the characteristics of the parent plant. These plant varieties are also ones which were grown before WWII. Many heirloom varieties were preserved by home gardeners who saved seed from their family gardens from year to year. Other seeds travelled around the world in the pockets or letters of immigrants, which is why, though the tomato evolved in Central America, we have varieties from Russia, Italy, Japan, France, Germany and Kentucky.

The suppliers of these historical seeds that I shopped from this year are Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds @ www.rareseeds.com, Wild Boar Farm Tomatoes @www.wildboarfarms.com, and Botanical Interests @ www.botanicalinterest.com. I was able to pick up all of the Botanical Interest seed packs from our great food co-op here in town www.greatbasinfood.coop .

I remember growing up and applying the fairly accurate theory that when the snow was melted off Peavine Mountain, it was safely time to plant those frost tender plants. In the past, that was around the middle of May. However, due to global warming, oops... I mean climate change, our last frost date now seems to be around the first week in June and since we can get an early killing frost around the first week in September, that leaves us with a fairly short growing season. I am planning on starting 90% of the seedlings inside but still, doing my research and selection, I searched for seeds that had relatively short germination and growing times. Since I am choosing to grow heirloom varieties, I still had hundreds of choices to choose from.

I ordered items like Chioggia beets, a pre-1640 heirloom, named after a fishing town in Italy. Once sliced open, this particular type of beet shows off it's stunning, alternating red and white rings making them look like little peppermint candies. There are several varieties of squash and melons that I'm really excited to grow this season, two of which are the Prescott Fond Blanc melon and the Galeux D'Eysines winter squash, both from France. Then there is the Lakota winter squash. Once a staple food of Native Americans, it boasts of a deliciously nutty flesh. I'm looking forward to a sampling.
A half dozen strains of lettuces, kales and chard seed packs found there way into the mailbox. There are also peppers, both hot and mild, rainbow colored carrots and purple podded peas.

And then there are the tomatoes, the undistputed queens of the garden. I ordered Green Zebras, Yellow Brandywines, Cherokee Purples, Striped Romans and the list goes on. I ended up with a dozen or so variations of these amazing fruits.

All in all, I think I ended up with a couple hundred seeds. Needless to say, way more than I can grow in my small urban yard. However, I am planning on starting all the seeds and growing the seedlings.

So..... around the end of May or the first part of June, I will be having a seedling/plant sale. I think it should be a lot of fun. I'll keep you posted.

Well, I think that about wraps it up for this post; a little daydreaming, a bit of lyrical prose about springtime and a whole lot of seeds.

Thanks for reading,

David

(Next week, I'll be posting on how to grow your own microgreens all year long) Stay tuned!