CHAPTER 6

Becoming a Daily Gardener

When I first started to grow soil sprouts, I planted a tray of seeds and harvested the greens 7 days later, then planted another tray and harvested that tray. I thought that was great—it was fast compared to the other types of greens I grew. Those lettuce and mesclun mixes needed 21 to 28 days at least before the first harvest of baby greens. Because I wanted to harvest more greens to use over a week, I started using larger trays, about the size of a typical cafeteria tray. I reasoned that if I had a larger harvest I could store greens in the refrigerator until the next harvest.

What actually happened was a mess!

The larger trays took longer to plant and were difficult to work with at the kitchen table. I needed larger shelves to hold these trays, and the new shelves didn’t look as good in the living room. The arrangement made it harder to get light to the entire tray without adding electric grow lights. On top of all that the larger trays had more trouble with damping off and molds.

They did yield a larger harvest, but there was a problem with that, too. The harvest took up too much room in the refrigerator, and the stored greens were more likely to brown or even go bad before we could eat them. I was not happy. I needed more greens but wasn’t sure how to make it happen.

Then it dawned on me that I could just plant smaller trays more frequently—even every day—creating successive daily harvests. With this simple change so many things fell into place: I could plant a small tray in a minute; it was easy. I had no more trouble with molds. Small trays were great for planting right at the kitchen table. Quick setup, quick clean up, and the planted trays fit in the kitchen cupboard for their initial incubation period of 4 days in the dark.

The small trays fit easily on a windowsill, too, or on a small shelf beside a window, making it possible to green the sprouts with natural light for the final few days. I was pleased to get rid of those grow lights.

Smaller trays tuck in around other houseplants, too, becoming part of the room decor. These are just a few of the reasons I was happy with this development. I started to think big by thinking small and switching to more frequent plantings.

Think “Every Day”

Actually I had to stop thinking like a farmer. When a farmer plants a crop the plan is for a one-time harvest of a huge crop after several months of growth when the plants finally mature. A gardener plants with a similar objective, just on a smaller scale.

For indoor salad gardening to work on a small-tray scale, I had to think of my crop as a daily salad and the time to maturity as a week to 10 days—a very different outlook than I had as an outdoor gardener. With a daily routine I plant what I expect to use in one day and it’s done in a few minutes using a little shelf space. I’m not planting to harvest a “crop,” but rather just enough for one salad—10 to 12 ounces (283.5–340.2 g) of fresh greens. When I know family or friends are coming for dinner, it’s easy to add a tray or two to the daily routine or harvest a few trays a day early.

By starting at the end, in this case knowing how much I want to harvest next week, I determine how much to plant today, tomorrow, and the next day. In 7 days the salad greens are ready to cut. Just enough. No worries about storage or spoilage.

It’s like a just-in-time inventory—the greens arrive on time, when I need them, every day.

To get the particular yield I want, I plant five trays a day, one each of the most popular seeds: sunflower, radish, buckwheat, pea, and broccoli. I add two trays of peas once a week for a family favorite—stir-fry with pea shoots, mushrooms, and garlic. If it’s winter and I want more greens, I add a few trays of sunflower or I add more seed varieties like purple kohlrabi, Chinese cabbage, or Hong Vit radish. These adjustments are easy to make when I have to plan only 10 days in advance.

The minimal space required by using the small trays makes it possible for someone living in an apartment, condominium, or dorm room to produce abundant fresh greens; an indoor salad garden using these small trays is not a garden only in name; it is a real, productive, feed-the-family garden.

What Do I Mean by “Small Tray”?

When I say “small tray” I’m talking about an open container measuring 3 inches wide by 6 inches long by 2 inches deep (7.6 × 15.2 × 5.1 cm); my “large tray” is 4 inches wide by 8 inches long by 2 inches deep (10.2 × 20.3 × 5.1 cm). (When I refer to a small tray or a large tray in this book, these are the sizes I am talking about unless otherwise noted.) Depending on the circumstances I use some ceramic bowls and wooden boxes and the foil bread pans. Table 6.1 gives an idea of the amount of seeds to plant in trays of different sizes.

Although I often use foil bread loaf pans for planting, there is a wide variety of trays that work just as well. These ceramic and wood, oval, round, and rectangular shapes work just as well and look nice. Calculate the amount of seeds to plant in your tray by comparing to the standard small 3-inch by 6-inch (7.6 × 15.2 cm) tray, then adjust from there.

Table 6.1. Seed Amounts for Different-Sized Trays

My garden friends poke fun at me, saying I’m no longer square foot gardening (outdoors, I use the Square Foot Gardening method popularized by Mel Bartholomew), I’m square inch gardening. The truth is, these may be the most productive square inches in the gardening world. I average yields of about 2 to 3 ounces (56.7–85.1 g) of greens from each small tray weekly. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if I plant four trays a day and harvest the low average of 2 ounces (56.7 g) of greens from each one, that comes to about 4 pounds (1.8 kg) of greens a week. Those 4 pounds are grown on only 1⁄2 of 1 square foot of garden space! And that’s the low estimate. I routinely harvest more, depending on the seed variety.

In concept planting small trays daily is similar to the idea I use in my outdoor garden, with successive plantings over the garden season. With the addition of smaller daily plantings, everything came together and I had a working model for indoor salad gardening.

Ready, Set, Go

With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, it was hard to contain my enthusiasm. Like discovering a star or a planet, I felt this was something new and different for gardeners everywhere. When I would start to tell a friend about it, my kids would groan, “There goes Dad again, talking about the garden!”

But I had a technique that solved the indoor salad garden problem for me, and I knew it would work for others, too. I started to ask gardeners and friends to try my techniques. Some of these folks were novices or friends willing to try just because I asked them to, bless them. Some were experienced gardeners I knew around the country, while others were people I met on gardening websites. Every single gardener who tried them, experienced and novice alike, was excited by the techniques and gave me positive feedback. The unanimous decision was . . . this really works!

I wanted those inexperienced gardeners’ reactions, too, to see if the system was simple enough that anyone could do it. My expert gardeners tended to change things and improvise more, so I was interested to see how the technique went over with novices. A friend from Pennsylvania wrote, “I have just one piece of advice for your other trial gardeners: Just follow the instructions!”

The most fun was hearing reactions from kids who tried these techniques and grew their own indoor salad gardens. I still laugh remembering one fourth-grade boy who decided to stage a race between my soil sprouts and a Chia Pet he got for Christmas. In case you’re wondering the soil sprouts won hands down.

Another friend sent pictures of his young son with trays of greens ready to harvest and a big smile on his face. A very nice lady from Kentucky posted her pictures online to display her results!

I was pleased to realize that growing soil sprouts on a windowsill was truly a new and exciting way to enjoy a productive indoor organic garden.

Get ready now to learn the craft of indoor salad gardening. I’ll cover every phase of growing in detail in the chapters that follow.

A Brief History of Sprouts

The history of using young tender shoots as a source of fresh food is murky. A time line would be a guess on my part, so I’ll provide a very general idea from the information I could find. But I’ll preface this by saying that learning sprout history isn’t necessary in order to grow them. My ulterior motive for going back in time was actually to discover more varieties of seeds appropriate for growing shoots today.

A general time line points to the Chinese for the discovery and wide use of sprouting techniques. The first written reference I could find was by Fuxi, Emperor of China in 2852 BC—nearly 5,000 years ago. The Chinese knew they were onto something special—they listed shoots as one of the four great inventions of food, along with bean curd, soy sauce, and gluten. It’s reasonable to assume that Chinese immigrants brought their traditional foods and techniques with them to the United States early on, including growing and eating shoots and sprouts. Oddly enough shoots did not find their way into American culture until more recently.

Tracing the popularity of all types of sprouts and shoots these days appears to be a matter of contemporary history. I follow the trail back to Ann Wigmore and Viktoras Kulvinskas working at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s. Although their main focus was on the therapeutic use of wheatgrass for health, they also emphasized a raw food diet. One aspect of their regimen was the use of soil-grown sunflower and buckwheat for nutrition. Many a raw-foods teacher, writer, or practitioner credits the influence of these two visionary people and their writings for the introduction of sprouts into our diet today. I join in a tip of the hat to the late Ann Wigmore and to Viktor Kulvinskas.

For a little over a year, from 1969 to 1970, I worked at the Hippocrates Health Institute myself. One of my jobs was to plant and tend to wheatgrass, sunflower, and buckwheat grown in trays of soil. I also learned to grow alfalfa and mung bean sprouts—at that time we were experimenting with different ways to grow them. The raw food movement focused more on sprouts like alfalfa and mung beans grown in jars, not on soil-grown sprouts. I find growing in soil is a lot easier in the long run and a lot more fun. Among the few drawbacks were the huge trays that made it difficult to do at home, and that problem is no more—it has been solved! Whatever the definitive history of shoots and soil-grown sprouts, I think they’re here to stay. We need them not just for the gardening pleasure they offer but as a useful tool to feed ourselves while reducing the resources we use in the process.