Dishdrainer Sprout Garden

A bowl of seeds for sandwich sprouts, alfalfa sprouts in the dish drainer ready to eat, and soaking mung bean seeds.
A bowl of seeds for sandwich sprouts, alfalfa sprouts in the dish drainer ready to eat, and soaking mung bean seeds.

We’re sprout eaters.  Tom heaps alfalfa and clover sprouts onto his lunch sandwich, and I love to sprinkle them on salads, or nibble them as fresh tasty snacks.   That’s why I’m rather embarrassed to admit that until last year, we bought most of our sprouts from the store.  Those containers-full of green goodness are expensive, and I never could think of a decent re-use for the plastic boxes they come in.   One day I remembered the countertop garden my mom (and all my friends’ moms) kept in the seventies.  Sprouts were in back in the day, and my sister Kelly and I were in charge of rinsing the sprouts whenever we walked by the counter in our platform sandals.  I had another sprouting phase in my pre-marriage single-chick apartment, where I kept trays of sunflower seeds sprouting in the window.   I wonder what happened?  Lots of people still eat sprouts, but the habit of growing them is generally regulated to bygone faddishness.

As soon as I realized we needed to become a sprout farmers, I walked down to our local health food store, just the sort of place we would have obtained our sprout supplies when I was a girl, though even mainstream suburban grocery stores had sprout seeds, jars, and lids.  No sprout seeds!  (“Hmm…we should think about getting some,” the guy behind the counter mused.) But at our local food coop I found plenty of sprout-worthy seeds in bulk.  Organic alfalfa or mixed clover are $9.95 a pound, which is almost free (there are about a trillion of those tiny seeds—several month’s worth– in a pound!).  Claire is the Princess Sprout-Rinser-in-Charge.  It’s been a delight to be growing food indoors throughout the winter, and benefiting from these yummy, vitamin-mineral-enzyme rich little wonders.

My favorite way to sprout seeds is the jar method:

  • Place a couple tablespoons of seeds in a quart jar, then cover the opening with cheesecloth and a canning jar rim.  Cover the seeds with water, and let sit several hours, or overnight.
  • Rinse the seeds with cool water several times a day, and invert them to drain.  We keep ours in the dish drainer.
  • When the sprouts are the size you want, pop them into the fridge.  You can set them in a window for a few hours first, if you want them to green up a bit.  If they are tiny alfalfa/clover sprouts, you might want to rinse the hulls off–just put them in a bowl, cover with water, and the hulls will float to the top where you can pour them off.
  • Don’t forget to start some more right away so you won’t have a lull between harvests!

There’s a terrific article on sprouts and sprouting, with recipes, in the current Mother Earth News article, “Kitchen Counter Gardening:  Try Sprouts.”  If you can’t find sprouting seeds in your local shop, try one of the online sources, such as Sproutman.

So far we’ve mainly sprouted sandwich/salad mixes (alfalfa/clover/mustard), lentils, and mung beans, but you can also sprout chickpeas, radish, adzuki beans, and much more.  I’m ready to try some more adventurous sprouting, as I wait for the earth to warm for the spring garden..   It hardly gets more simple, local, healthy, delicious, or cheap—Happy sprouting!

7 Comments

  1. KT

    This in inspiring–I’ve also wanted to try growing cilantro indoors in the winter–supposedly you can clip and eat it and it lasts for several weeks. Have you tried it? Loving your new blog!

  2. Serena

    Ah, sprouts bring back childhood 70’s memories for me too. Thanks for the reminder; I’m wondering if my preschooler would take to them since there are only a handful of vegetables he really loves. Seems like a good way to get kids involved with the growing/cooking and hopefully eating.

  3. What a great skillshare, Lyanda! I find that the most important parts of sprouting are rinsing enough and knowing when to refrigerate. It’s an education getting started, but well worth it.
    Please feel free to create an RSS feed to your page on HOMEGROWN.org – a great way to make friends and share ideas. Good luck!

  4. Irene Haupt

    Hi Ly,
    Love your blog.
    I too, have some seeds sprouting in the kitchen. Brings back happy memories.
    A suggestion…if one does not want to deal with the cheese cloth, Amazon has a sprouting jar lid that fits wide mouth canning jars for $3.95. I just might get one.
    love you…mom

  5. I am so enjoying Crow Planet just now. I’d not heard of you, but the hardback was prominently placed in the Green Lake library branch and after reading the back blurbs, I quickly grabbed it before anyone else could.

    Now I find you have a blog containing a huge sampling of my other interests (beyond crows, that is). I’m simply going to have to meet you, so looking forward to your reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore in May.

  6. I and also my friends were actually reviewing the nice tricks on your web blog and all of a sudden came up with an awful feeling I had not thanked the web blog owner for those techniques. The women became absolutely very interested to study them and have in effect undoubtedly been enjoying those things. Appreciate your being indeed accommodating as well as for settling on varieties of cool information most people are really desirous to learn about. My honest regret for not expressing gratitude to you earlier.

Comments are closed.