Grow Your Own Sprouts

Have you ever been eating a sandwich or salad and kept thinking that it needed just a little of something else? Try wheat grass or broccoli sprouts.

These sprouts are high nutritional. Broccoli is known to have one of the highest levels of anti-oxidants, but broccoli sprouts have 30-50 times this level of nutritional value as a regular head of broccoli (John Hopkins University, 1997). According to Dr. Ann Wigmore of The Hippocrates Institute in Boston, it would take twenty-five pounds of your best vegetables to equal only one pound of fresh wheat grass. It seems that eating these sprouts would be an easier way for you to receive your daily nutritional values for the day.

Eating sprouts is a lot easier than trying to eat several helpings of regular size vegetables. Especially when you can grow them yourselves.

The process to grow and harvest these sprouts takes a week at the most. It is simple and easy. Below is the procedure that I commonly use to grow my sprouts:

- Upon receiving your seed packet, soak the seeds in warm water for at least 4 hours.
- Using a plastic seedling tray works well to hold the seeds and growing medium. Mix potting soil with warm water and mix evenly so that the soil is uniformly wet.
- Drain the water away from the seeds and sprinkle them over the growing medium.
- Covering the tray with a lid creates a type of greenhouse, which conserves water and heat.
- Place the tray under a light or in a windowsill to generate heat. The added heat from the light or sunshine quickens the process.
- In less than a week, you should see the sprouts germinating.
- Harvest the sprouts when the first leaves appear.

Wheat grass can be harvested several times from the same crop. I have gotten three separate cuttings from one crop. The wheat grass just keeps growing! The broccoli sprouts are good for one cutting. Both sprouts are great in salads or in sandwiches. Wheat sprouts are a good addition in juicing.

There are many sources for seed sprouts and sprouting kits. I like the three tier sprouting kit available from Burpee. The tiers allow you to grow different varieties of sprouts without taking any more space. Burpee also offers what they call a zesty mix of sprouting seeds including Alfalfa, broccoli, clover, and radish. This is a great way to experiment with growing your own sprouts and sample a variety of types to see what you like best.