Growing Your Own

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Anyone will tell you, I've always been a fan of Growing Your Own. Why spend your hard-earned money on expensive imported stuff that's traveled hundreds of miles, when you can grow it yourself, in your very own house?


We're here today to talk about growing your own... live veggie sprouts! Hahaha!!!

If you've ever had a sandwich or a salad topped with raw spinach or broccoli sprouts, you know what I'm talking about. Fresh, live, vegetable goodness!!

And you've probably had mung bean sprouts in your Chinese food at one time or another.

I've grown my own mung bean sprouts in the past, but haven't tried any of the salad seed varieties. I was recently reading some of the info on the raw foods trend (which is a bit too extreme for me to make any commitment to, but interesting nonetheless) and remembered how good, easy, and fun it is to grow your own sprouts. Oh, and did I mention that it is *cheap*?!


Rather than investing the $26 in one of these doohickeys that I was really tempted to get, I just spent the $4.50 or so and got plastic, mesh-like canning jar tops that fit on the wide mouth jars (I got them at Eats, in case you want to get some... though I'd probably just skip it or go the tray route next time, these aren't ideal).

While at Eats I also picked up a small quantity of mixed salad sprout seeds and a small bag of their mixed stir-fry sprout seeds in their bulk spice section. I bought a bag of mung beans on the cheap at the Oasis Food Mart. I started out by soaking the seeds overnight on Saturday night, and the beans are already sprouting (it's Tuesday). I wound up with too many mung beans, so have 2 jars of mung beans and 1 jar of the salad mix. I haven't tried sprouting the stir-fry mix yet.

Above is a shot of sprouting the salad mix, which includes lentils, broccoli and radish sprouts, and a few other unidentified seed varieties (the white "tails" are the sprouts starting to come out). The mung beans:


One last beauty shot of the salad mix...

I can't wait... in just a few more days I'll be eating fresh, homegrown (albeit, small!) produce!!