How to Grow Your Own Sprouts at Home for Less Than 50 Cents a Day

If you are wanting to grow a little bit of your own food but you don't know where to start, you're overwhelmed, you feel like you're just gonna kill those plants anyway, or it's freezing cold where you live, or it's burning up hot where you live, or you don't have enough space, if you've got excuses that are keeping you from growing your own food, then this is the project for you. This is something that I waited way too long to learn how to do. I grew up, I was living when we first got married, and when I was in my 20s, I lived in townhouses and apartments and places that had no yards, and I would look longingly at the people who had a yard and wish I could start gardening, and I waited when I should have been growing because I should have been doing this. So if you're waiting to grow, if you're waiting to start a garden because of the weather or the space or your experience, this is the project for you, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to do it yourself. So these are sprouts. Sprouts are the very first growth of plants from seed. Sprout is the little bitty growth that comes right when the seed starts to open up and produce a plant, and the magic of growing sprouts at home is one, they need so little space. So all that you need to grow sprouts is this little container right here. Nothing bigger, no more space than this. So if you've got space enough for a dinner plate, then you've got space enough to grow sprouts. The next magical thing about sprouts is they don't need light to keep them growing. Now, you can use a little bit of window light to finish up the process, but you don't need light to get them started through the sprouting. Growing sprouts is also so easy if you don't have a lot of time, and all of us are that four-letter word, right? B-U-S-Y, we're busy. Well, sprouts are gonna take so little of your time and attention, and I'm gonna show you how you can get this done in the time it takes to turn on your kitchen sink. Literally, it is that simple. So if you don't have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of space, and you don't have a place with a lot of light, then sprouts are the thing for you. Also, if you like just eating simply, if you like dishes that you can pull together really quickly, if you like simple flavors, and you're all about getting more nutrition in the food that you eat, then you're gonna love sprouts. Each little sprout that comes from a seed, it includes, it has inside of it all the nutrition that that plant would have if it grew to its full maturity. But you get to catch it at the very start when it's tiny. So you're gonna get all this nutrition, all these antioxidants, all this immune-boosting food, but you're getting it in just a tablespoonful. So forget taking vitamins. Well, if you wanna take vitamins, go for it. But this is real food that is packed with vitamins. So if you're looking for a way that your body can absorb and digest and use the nutrients that you're eating besides just taking a pill, then this is your new best friend. So, have I convinced you? Now I'm gonna show you the simplest way to grow your own food at home right now, right away, wherever you are, no matter if you killed every other plant you've ever tried to grow. All right, so let's start with the setup. First off, you need a draining or straining tray. So this is, I recommend using a tray that goes flat. You wanna have a lot of surface area. So I've seen people grow sprouts in jars with a little bit of a draining area, and that's just a recipe for mold and mildew and stuff that you don't want on your sprouts. So you wanna have a lot of surface area. I found the best luck by having at least a dinner plate's worth of surface area of draining. So the goal is to have little tiny, tiny drains, straining areas, mesh, that are going to allow the seeds to stay in place, but get all the water off the seeds. So the magic with sprouting is that the seeds get soaked with water and soaked with water and soaked again with water to the point that they have to germinate. But they are going to be soaked with water, but then they have to drain. Otherwise, they mold, they mildew, or they just, like, drown, okay? So you need a draining tray, and I would recommend having at least two at a time, and I'm gonna show you why, all right? So two draining trays. Then you wanna have a non-draining tray. So this is going to be for the very first step of creating your sprouts. You need something that's gonna hold the seeds and the water, but not drain. And then later, this is gonna protect your draining as you're working with your sprouts and you're draining them day after day after day, all right? So non-draining tray, at least two draining trays. And then finally, I like to have a little top just to keep everything closed up clean, keep all the, you know, things we don't want in our sprouts away from them. So the top two. Okay, so that's all you need to get started. Simple enough, right? Now we're gonna take our seeds, and in this case, I've got alfalfa. I can thank my fourth grade teacher, Miss Lewis, for this one. She made me sit by her in fourth grade because I was passing notes in class. I'm gonna clean this out for a sec. She made me sit by her in class at lunch because I was passing notes in class. And when I was sitting by her, she had this sandwich that was literally this tall and it was just bread and avocado and these sprouts, tons and tons of sprouts. Miss Lewis was ahead of her time. This was like 1989 or something, okay? And she was eating sprout sandwiches. And so this is in honor of Miss Lewis. I love you. Thanks for making me sit by you at lunch. And so you're just going to put, it's really about, I would say, a teaspoon of alfalfa sprout seeds here on the non-draining tray, okay? So you want to look around. Basically, you want to cover most of the surface area of this tray, but not too much. So I like to kind of measure it out and make sure that I'm going to mostly cover the tray, but I don't want it stacked. I don't want more than one on any area of the tray, and I'll show you why in a second. All right, so that's looking pretty good. I could probably put a few more here, but this is really what we want it to look like here on the non-draining tray, all right? So lots of seeds, seeds covering most of the bottom, but not overlapping. That's when you're in the right place, okay? So the next thing is some filtered water. So we're just going to take a little bit of filtered water, and you're going to soak your seeds. So you can use lots of different kinds of seeds for sprouting. You can do radish seeds, broccoli seeds, kale seeds. I wouldn't do spinach seeds, lettuce seeds. All kinds of seeds work for this. So I'm going to pour this about a third of the way full, and that's the first step. So you are now officially a gardener, okay? So just give yourself a little pat on the back. You're a gardener. You just planted some seeds. You just didn't need any dirt or soil or a shovel. You just needed some water, okay? So you're going to do this right before you go to bed on the very first day of working in the garden, okay? Sorry, these are making me a little sniffly. So this is going to sit overnight. This is when your top comes in handy. Going to put the top over it. Let it sit there overnight, all right? So just come in here. We don't want any dust or any particles, things like that coming over here. Put the top on, let it sit overnight. Then we're going to come to the next day, okay? So you wake up the next morning. You remember, oh, I got to do my sprouts. And this is when you're going to do the first step that you'll just do again and again and again, okay? So you're going to take your non-draining tray, no, your draining tray, and this is where you're going to start to use this one. All right, so let's pretend that these seeds have soaked for about 12 hours. It's the first morning after you soak them, and you're just going to come to the kitchen sink. Remember I told you this is as simple as turning on the kitchen sink, and it really is. So you're going to take your draining tray, and you're going to take your soaked seeds, and you're going to pour these over the sink, all right? So we're going to let all the water come out, and then we'll leave the seeds in the draining tray. So these are pretty stuck. If you've done it right and soaked them overnight, they're going to get unstuck pretty easily. I'm going to pour a little bit more water in here to see if I can loosen them up. They were so happy. They were like, wait, we're just about to soak. Why are you rushing the process? I'm sorry, I'm doing a demo here, okay? Okay, so that's about right. So we've got them now in the draining tray. So that's your first step. How long did that take? I don't know, a minute, if that. And then your job here is to spread out your seeds. So this is really the most complicated part, is just getting your seeds so that they are nice and distributed all across the draining tray. Because remember, the trick here is surface area. You want each of them to have enough surface area to spread out and to fully drip dry in the draining tray so that they don't collect mold or mildew and so that they turn into sprouts, okay? So that is the process. You're going to do this the second morning, the first morning after you started and you soaked your seeds the night before. Then you go through your whole day. Enjoy your day. Don't worry about a thing. Your sprouts, they got you. They're taking care of things for you. You don't have to tend them. You don't have to cut them. You don't have to prune them. You don't have to fertilize them. They're just sitting here in the draining tray getting ready to sprout for you. That night, so 12 hours later, you come back, you turn on the kitchen sink, and you give them a rinse. And so you're just going to take your water, rinse it through, and let it drain right into the draining tray. Then you're going to just empty out this water so that there's nothing funky growing in there and let this drip dry overnight. And then you're going to start the process all over again. Second morning, wake up, rinse, drip dry. Second night, come back after dinner, rinse, drip dry. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Every time you come to the sink in the morning, rinse. Every time you come to the kitchen sink at night, give it another rinse. Then the magic starts to happen, all right? So when you get to probably day, I want to say day five or so, when you open it up, you're going to see this. So all of a sudden, all of those seeds that have just been rinsed and rinsed and dripped and dried, they turn into this. Now, this is actually a few days after these started to show signs of sprouting. And what I did during the day is I just opened up the lid for a few hours. So if you don't do that, you'll end up with yellow sprouts that are fine to eat, but opening up the lid allows a little bit of light in for these leaves to photosynthesize and to turn into sprouts. Now, once they hit this stage, they are actually, believe it or not, these are ready to eat, okay? These are completely edible and ready to go, but you can let them continue to sprout for a few more days if you want them to get bigger and have more leaves on them. So let me show you what it looks like. So this is what they look like on the bottom. So crazy, right? So you can see how each of these plants is becoming one little tiny plant. They've got their roots stretching out below and they've got their green on top. And the whole thing is 100% edible. So this is what the roots look like down below. And when you're ready to eat them, you're just gonna pull them up out of the tray. I'll show you in a second. This is a tray. I practice what I preach, right? So this is a tray I've been eating on every day this week, or over the last, I would say, two days. I put sprouts on my avocado toast and my omelets and things like that, especially in the morning. And so you can see how I've used up pretty much all these sprouts, and they're all pretty mature. So this tray is basically done. I wanted to save it and show you what it looks like toward the end. This one is ready to be rinsed out and then started all over again. So you can see these sprouts, see this? Now watch this. I just grew my own food. Isn't that amazing? And it's so nutritious, so delicious, and so easy, right? So this is gonna get rinsed off, go into the dishwasher, and then it'll be ready to be used tomorrow. So here's the beautiful thing. Let me show you, okay? So these are, this was today's sprouts, okay? These are tomorrow's sprouts, and I could use these over, say, the next two or three days. Let's say this is tomorrow's and the next day's and the next day's sprouts. Then these are the next day and the next day and the next day's sprouts. And then these could be the next day and the next day and the next day's sprouts. And right here in this little stack, I've got enough sprouts to feed myself, my family, anybody who happens to come to my front door with delicious, nutritious, super awesome fresh food that I grew myself on the size of a dinner plate. Are you in or are you in? I have to know. I mean, is this the most amazing thing? So you could stack this thing to the roof and have all kinds of different sprouts growing. You could have radishes and kale and basil and broccoli and lettuces and alfalfa, anything you wanna grow, and just stack and stack and stack and grow your own sprouts at home, not just this week, but every single week of the year, no matter how cold or hot it is outside, you can do this too. All right, so you have to let me know in the comments if this is something you're gonna go for, because I really think that this is a project every single person can do. So if you have an argument, if you're like, this won't work for me, you gotta tell me why in the comments. Okay, so my mission is to be growing my own sprouts and eating my own sprouts every day of the new year. And I wanna help you do that too. So we have loads of resources at gardenary.com to help you grow. And we have a free resource called the Gardenary Calendar, where you can put in two dates and we'll show you every date that you need to know to know when to grow things in your own climate and year, wherever you are growing. We also have my book, Leaves, Roots, and Fruit. If you love this project, you're gonna love this book. I teach a load about growing all kinds of things, but the first section is leaves. And the very first chapter is all about sprouts and microgreens. So if you love simple, easy, step-by-step instruction in the garden, you're gonna love my book, Leaves, Roots, and Fruit. You can find the link to buy it below this video or anywhere books are sold. All right, I am sold on growing my own sprouts, and I hope you are too. They're so delicious, so nutritious, and literally the freshest tasting thing you can find. This is a food you literally can't buy. Like you can either grow it or that's it. So if there's ever a food you should start growing yourself, it should be sprouts. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you, after testing dozens of sprouting systems, this one is my favorite. And because it's my favorite, I love it because it gives plenty of surface area for your seeds to dry out and to not grow mold or mildew. And it also allows you to grow the perfect amount of sprouts to feed yourself and your family every single day. And it's a complete system. You can get the bottom, you can get two. And it's, what's that called, where you can build on top of it? You can order two of them. You can order a modular, that's it. You can order two of them, four of them, and you can grow sprouts for your entire neighborhood. I love it so much that we added it to the Gardnery shop. So depending on when you're watching this video, it should be available either for pre-order or to buy and ship to your house right away. So you can check that out at thegardnery.com shop. Just head to gardenery.com, click that shop button, and it'll bring you right there to order your own sprout starter like I've got. Tell me if I've convinced you in the comments. I cannot wait to see the sprouts that you grow yourself. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.