Its been about a week since my last update. In this update I'll tell you about how we've been using the microgreens, how we made a happy discovery with some wheatgrass and where the lettuce starts are at.
The microgreens are here
The microgreens were ready a few days ago and a couple trays made their way into a few of our dishes.
Here are a couple of "recipes" from my use of one tray of zesty radish microgreens.
Grated Carrot Salad with Sauerkraut and Microgreens
When lettuce isn't available, my go-to base salad is grated carrots. My kids love raw carrots and organic carrots from our local farmers are delicious, inexpensive and plentiful almost all year round.
Ingredients
- 3-4 grated carrots
- 1/2 tray of microgreens (I'm using zesty radish)
- Sauerkraut to taste
1/2 tray of zesty radish microgreens
Chop the stems of the microgreens finely but leave the leaves (cotyledons) intact.
Combine carrots, sauerkraut and microgreens and then toss
Et voila.
Hard to get much simpler or easier but very tasty and nutritious.
This salad only has 3 ingredients and they all have to be good in order for it to work. I recommend using happy carrots from your local farmer and home made sauerkraut. Making your own lacto-fermented sauerkraut is easy - checkout Sandor Katz's method here.
So, what happened to that other half of the tray? Fried rice and my lunch.
Spicy Fried Rice with Microgreens
Not much of a recipe here. I had some left over rice which I fried up and added microgreens and homemade hot sauce to.
The remaining 1/2 of the tray weighed in at 19-20g so I estimate my total harvest from the tray to be 36-40g.
Pretty!
Stems chopped finely, leaves left whole
I added the microgreens after I took the fried rice off of the heat and let the residual warmth of the rice to soften the greens.
A happy accident - frozen wheatgrass treats
A couple days ago I tried to make a carrot / wheatgrass smoothie. I didn't fancy it but Jake, our 5 yr old English black lab, loved it and quickly lapped up a small bowl.
Annie had the brilliant idea to freeze the rest in treat-sized portions (doughnut shaped no less). A few hours later both Jake and Rosie (our 3 yr old English golden lab) confirmed their approval of these new frozen carrot/wheatgrass smoothie treats:
I liked the frozen version of the smoothie far more too. I don't have a recipe to share yet, but I'll post it here when its ready.
Lettuce and cress update
The lettuce and cress are ready to be pricked out into bigger containers. Hoping to have the first leaves ready for a fresh salad around Christmas.
Hardy lettuce mix starts at 11 days grown in Jiffypot® 3" biodegradable grow pots filled with peat moss from one Jiffy Quick Soil Mix (QSM) pellet. One pellet filled both pots.
I'll prick all of these out into a larger container where they'll grow to maturity. I'll harvest them continuously starting in about 2-3 weeks as baby greens.
The blue tray is a "mushroom till" that served as the first trays the micro farmers used in our kits. We have a bunch of these left over and they make an almost perfectly sized small grow tray for peat moss and other soil-like growing mediums.
Each tray holds 2 peat pots and makes it easy to bottom water.
These are the cress starts at 11 days grown. They're also grown in peat moss from a Jiffy Quick Soil Mix (QSM) pellet.
I'll prick out a couple dozen shoots and pot them up to grow baby cress. I'll harvest the remaining shoots in a couple days time for use as cress microgreens - I'm thinking of making some cress butter with them. Will keep you posted.
Same blue tray as the lettuce only this time there are two of them, one sitting in the other (not that you can see that from the photo). I've poked holes in the top tray holding the growing medium. This lets me bottom water the top tray by pouring water into the bottom tray which has no holes. If I over water, its easy to dump out the excess water in the bottom tray.
Sweet Peppers!
I've started some sweet paprika and bangles peppers from seed I saved from my garden this year. The bangles popped up quite quickly and I'm hoping the sweet paprika will join them in the next few days.
These are grown in little Jiffy peat pellets, six of which fit nicely into our first custom microgreen tray.
I'm hoping to be harvesting fresh peppers from them before April.