All About Sprouts

Sprouts are an amazing vegetable full of tons of vitamins, nutrients, and other good stuff. In fact, they have even more nutrients than normal salad greens. Plus, they're just plain delicious. Normally, sprouts tend to be a rather hard-to-find, expensive item at the grocery store, but the good news is, it is super easy and a lot of fun to grow them yourself at home. All you need are a few simple supplies and a little extra counter space.                                                                      

You will need:

• A sprouting lid and jar (we got sprouting lids that screw onto wide-mouth canning jars. A quart size jar is best.)
• Sprouting seeds: Some seeds are treated to prevent them from sprouting, so make sure you get special seeds that say they are made for sprouting. Probably organic ones too.

Here's what you do:

• Put about one or two tablespoons of seeds in your jar, depending on the size of the seeds. The smaller the seeds, the fewer you will put in the jar. Your package of seeds should tell you how many. Fill the jar with some water and let the seeds soak for about 8 hours.
• After the seeds have soaked, tip the jar upside down to let the water drain out. Rinse and drain the seeds, leaving the jar in a bowl at around a 45 degree angle.
• Rinse and drain the seeds about two or three times a day. If they start to smell or get moldy, you're probably not rinsing them often enough or draining them well. If this happens, throw them out and start over again. But as long as you rinse and drain your seeds well, you shouldn't have to worry about bacteria forming.
• The seeds should begin to sprout within 24 hours, and they will be ready to eat in about 3-5 days. When they're almost done, leave them in a sunny spot to "green up" a bit.
• Keep your sprouted sprouts in the refrigerator for up to a week, rinsing them once a day to keep them fresh (if you leave them out, they'll keep on growing!)

Here's a series of photos I took showing how the seeds sprout. The seed mix is called "Crunchy Bean Mix", and since the seeds are really big, they take the longest of all to sprout. However, as you can tell, they're still ready in about 4 days.

Dry sprouting seeds, ready for soaking

After about 9 hours of soaking (soaking them for an hour or two longer won't hurt them)

24 hours later

After about 30 hours

After two days, you can see the sprouts have really begun to sprout!

Three and a half days later, the leaves of the sprouts have developed. This is when I like to put them in some light so they can get greener and even more nutritious!

The sprouts were ready on the fourth day, but I don't have any photos of that. Sprouts never seem to last very long in our house!

I hope you enjoyed this post on sprouts! If you have any more questions that I didn't answer in this post, just leave a comment below.

~Rachel