Growing Microgreens At Home A Convenient Healthy Choice
Growing microgreens at home provides nutrient dense, readily available food at a tremendous savings.
This is a great article about the nutrient density of micro greens and sprouts! Just think a sprinkling of these little powerhouses in your diet can make a huge impact! And growing microgreens at home will also save you time and money.
Sprouts are also especially useful for those times when we have a hard time eating the volume of “green” that we know we need for optimal health. We wanted to share this article with you as it fits the lifestyle we teach and educate people on daily at our center.
USDA researchers recently published a study assessing the nutrition content of 25 commercially available microgreens, seedlings of vegetables and herbs that have gained popularity in upscale markets and restaurants. Just a few inches tall, they boast intense flavors and vivid colors, but what about their nutritional content? No one knew until now.
We’ve known that baby spinach leaves, for example, have higher levels of phytonutrients than mature spinach leaves, but what about really baby spinach which is just a week or two old?
Microgreens won hands down (leaves down?) possessing significantly higher nutrient densities than mature leaves. For example, red cabbage microgreens have a 6-fold higher vitamin C concentration than mature red cabbage and 69 times the vitamin K.
Microgreens are definitively more nutrient dense, but are often eaten in small quantities. Even the healthiest garnish isn’t going to make much of a difference to one’s health, and microgreens may go for $30 a pound!
But BYOM—birth your own! You can have rotating trays of salad that you can snip off with scissors. It’s like gardening for the impatient. You can have microgreens fully-grown in just 7 to 14 days! If that’s too long, what about sprouting? See my 1-min. video Antioxidants Sprouting Up to see what happens to the antioxidant content of seeds, grains, and beans when you sprout them.
Homemade sprouts are probably the most nutrition-per-unit-cost we can get for our money. They recently beat out the previous champ, purple cabbage. Broccoli sprouts are probably the best for your health. I would recommend against alfalfa sprouts (even when home sprouted) as fecal bacteria from manure can hide in the seed’s nooks and crannies and cause illness.
The Health Benefits of Growing Microgreens At Home
The nutrient summary of each microgreen will depend immensely on which type of microgreen you’re eating. A great source of iron, calcium and beta-carotene are your leafy greens. When eating chard and kale which are the dark green leafy vegetables you’re getting zeaxanthin and lutein in higher concentrations.
Growing microgreens needs only a small amount of sunlight and a limited amount of space to grow so your kitchen makes an ideal place. This allows you to control the growing conditions and the kind of microgreens you want to sprout.
The control you have over home-grown microgreens also eliminates any pollutants that the commercially grown varieties contain. Growing them at home gives you complete management over how they are grown including exposure to herbicides, pesticides and the kind and quality of the soil you’ll be using.
Increasing the amount of greens and vegetables you eat becomes much easier when you grow your own microgreens at home. It gives you easy access and then incorporating them into your daily regimen.
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