• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

“Good things will come to those who wait.”  While that may be true in principle, it’s tough to replace the convenience of ramen noodles and a king can of light beer (tongue planted firmly in cheek).

If you follow some of the contents of our posts, you will know there is a bit more of a conversation starting there these days – this is something that thrills me beyond words.  It’s just so much fun to see others discussing back and forth and learning and sharing off of each other and really feels much more like a conversation and not a speech.  It’s just a lot more fun for us and, hopefully, for those involved.

It was in the comments last week that I declared an interest in growing sprouts.  Amanda cheered us on and then insisted that we should get a move on and try it out.  One of the luxuries of working in suburbia is convenient access to, well, everything.  It turned out that I could buy a starter kit at the organic grocery store that is 50 feet from our front door.  I came home with 3 sprouting kits that night.  It’s 4 days later and we are close to a cheap, healthy and local feast.

We’ve learned a lot about sprouts and sprouting in the last week and will share more in coming weeks as we experiment and learn further.  For now we’ll talk about the basics and the economics.

Before we talk about what a sprout kit is, let’s talk about what the basics of what you do to grow sprouts:

• Place a small amount of seeds in a container – we, predictably, used preserving jars.
• Place a filter over the top of the jar – a piece of cheese cloth secured by an elastic band or jar ring.  You will be rinsing the seeds and draining the jar often.  You want the filter small enough to release water while still containing the sprouts.
• Soak seeds from 4-12 hours to start them becoming fertile.
• Drain the water from the seeds, rest the jar upside down on an angle.  You want to drain any excess water and allow air to circulate.  I read something which basically said “sprouts don’t like to swim but they like to dip their feet in the water a lot.”  This imagery provided great guidance through the week.
• 2-3 times a day fill the jars with water and drain, return to the upside down angled resting position and leave out of direct sunlight.  Sprouts with a lot of green leaves can be finished for a day or two in the sun to develop their flavor.
• Small sprouts will be bountiful in 3 or 4 days, larger sprouts will take a few days later.

Most of the advice we read guided us to use wide-mouthed jars to make the sprouts easier to remove.  We used small jars knowing that they would be crowded but we are actually short of larger wide-mouthed jars.

We are growing 3 crops this week – alphalpha, baby radish and a mixed sprout package.  The seeds proudly claim that they are organic and our total cost is less than $0.40 per jar.  I am confident that if we used a larger jar we would have a larger crop for the same price.

If we had kids this is a project that I would have them run on a regular basis.  I think there is so much potential learning for them and can imagine that guiding them through the process.

We are going to experiment over the next few weeks and see what we manage to grow.  We’ll update progress on the project as we learn lessons, make mistakes and get some great tastes.  For now, it’s such a healthy, affordable and neat project that we had to name it as part of Cheap Tuesday Gourmet.

Cheap Tuesday gourmet is a series of posts on eating more affordably and has been running for several weeks..  The full details are here but the premise is simple – creating good, wholesome food at affordable pricing as a means to support and create a dialogue in which we can share how to eat wholesome food at a fraction of a price of fast food alternatives.  The terms gourmet and cheap are relative – the term Tuesday is not.  Click on the tag Cheap Tuesday Gourmet (below this paragraph) will link you to all of the articles.