Getting Greens in Your Diet When You’re Homebound
Getting Greens in Your Diet When You’re Homebound
UPDATE (March 31, 2020): I did a live Facebook video showing how my microgreens are going, and you can watch it here. (I apologize for the video quality not being great but I think it had something to do with the internet probably being overloaded during the Coronavirus. It was my first live video, so hopefully I’ll get better at this.)
Original post (March 14, 2020): I have been closely watching the news about the Coronavirus pandemic for several weeks. I immediately started making my own preparations for potentially being homebound for some period of time. I knew that we had plenty of stuff we could thaw out of the freezer, canned beans and vegetables, plenty of pasta and rice. But getting fresh greens is a tough one. I always grow lettuce in my garden, and I have recently started some under cover, but it will be some time before I’ll have anything I can harvest. Then I saw online the idea of growing microgreens indoors.
I had never considered growing microgreens, but it seemed like a pretty cool idea. They grow quickly and are packed with nutrients and supposedly can easily be grown indoors. I don’t have a lot of space, but I figured I could at least set a few pots on windowsills. So I scrounged around in the pantry and found an old bag of dry lentils, which I was able to plant and harvest after about a week and a half.
The lentils definitely didn’t produce enough greens to make a salad or anything, but I added them to a salad I made. They had a nice flavor. In the meantime, I tried to figure out who else might sell seeds for microgreens. Some of the most popular items to grow seem to be sunflower and pea shoots. I thought I could find these at my grocery store, but all they had were split peas and sunflower seeds that had been de-shelled. I assumed these would not work.
So I looked around online and ordered from a company called True Leaf Market because they seemed to have a good selection. I did a little research to see what greens are the easiest and most popular to grow, and figured I’d try three different varieties to start and experiment with. I settled on broccoli, sunflower and pea, buying a pound of each. They arrived a couple days ago.
I planted the broccoli seed directly, but the sunflower and pea it recommended to soak in water for 12 – 24 hours. So I did that and now I am letting them sit for another 24 hours while just rinsing them several times a day (which is also recommended by TLM’s how-to videos). Then I will plant them. As you can see, I am not doing a large quantity, because I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want to screw it up and kill a huge batch.
Update, March 19, 2020:
Here is a picture of the progress so far.
Sunflower definitely take the longest. The peas grow pretty quickly and become a nice, hearty green. The broccoli are very delicate and are nice to sprinkle on top of other dishes like veggies, fish or chicken. See my video at the top of the page for another update on how the growing is going.
