Angry Garden 2011: Sprouting Seeds Indoors

When I was little, my dad always had sprouts going in a very 70's looking contraption near our kitchen sink. 

 For Christmas, my son, the gardener, got a set of Sprout Garden trays from Santa. We had fresh sprouts for salads and sammiches all winter! It's the best thing!

As I started my yearly ritual with the evil peat pot tray, it dawned on me that the sprout garden trays would be perfect for germinating seeds.  

The advantage I'm going for with sprouting the seeds outside of the soil is so that I'm not wasting a peat pot when I transplant the seeds to the evil peat pot tray. Sometimes you just plant a seed, it does nothing, and you go, 'what the hell happened to that guy?'. Then you wait and wait to see if the stupid thing is going to decide to come up. So, I figure that, this way, I'm only planting the seeds that aren't duds.

 

Here are peas and carrots. I only had three Sprout Garden trays, so I combined seeds that looked really different and would be easy to separate later (plus, I thought putting peas & carrots together was funny). The carrot seeds are the really small ones. The peas have sprouted first, still waiting on the carrots. 

Then I realized that a lot of people just grow snack spouts the old fashioned way... in jars, rinsing  and draining the water twice a day. Couldn't this work to germinate seeds? I used baby food jars and a paper organizer from Ikea. To strain them, I used the Sprouting Strainer Lid used for sprouting in mason jars. You could use a mesh screen or even a small colander.

It worked! Here is some lettuce after just a few days of the sprout treatment.

The process has gotten interesting, because I can see what the seeds are doing as they sprout. It turns out that rosemary acts a lot like tomato seeds... they have that gelatinous coating around them, so they don't need watered as often.

Sunflower seeds are often sold as edible sprouts, so I've seen them do their thing before. These were really easy to plant in a peat pot, and I knew I wasn't wasting a pot with a dud.

Some of the seeds, like this catnip, were too small to filter through the strainer....they went right through and ended up in the sink. Instead of straining, I fit a paper towel into one of the baby food jars, put the seeds in, and mist these whenever I'm by the sink and notice they're dry.

The extra water drips to the bottom of the baby food jar, so I never have to try to rinse, then drain, these tiny seeds.

Hopefully my sprouting experiment works. If not, I've just wasted a lot of seeds. So far, my seed garden has only cost around $12.00, because I bought more peat pots for the indoor tray and a few new seed packets. Most of the seeds I planted are from my seed stash that I am finally using, or from plants that dropped seeds last year.

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