Sprouts are a powerhouse of nutrition, bringing vibrant flavor and a crunchy texture to a variety of meals. Whether you’re looking to enhance your diet with fresh, homegrown ingredients or want to save money compared to store-bought options, growing your own sprouts is a simple and rewarding way to bring fresh greens into your home year-round.

What Are Sprouts?

Before we dive into the how and why of sprouts, let’s take a look at what sprouts are.

Sprouts vs Microgreens

There’s some understandable confusion between the terms “Sprouts” and “Microgreens”. They’re both small plants that you eat, right? What’s the difference?

The main difference between sprouts and microgreens is that microgreens require soil. Age is also a determining factor. When microgreens are harvested, they are generally about 3 weeks old. Sprouts, on the other hand, are far younger, harvested before they even have their secondary leaves.

Sprouts grow entirely using the nutrients contained within their cotyledons, that’s the meat inside the seed-shell itself.

Because of their limited interaction with the local environment (i.e. soil), sprouts are highly concentrated versions of their parent plants. This means they contain high amounts of vitamins and antioxidants.

Why Grow Your Own Sprouts?

In addition to their nutrient benefits, there’s a lot of reasons to grow your own sprouts rather than buy them from the grocery store. That’s, of course, assuming your local grocer even stocks sprouts … many don’t.

Cost-Effective Compared to Store-Bought Sprouts

I’m lucky enough to live in an area where there are excellent grocery stores with highly stocked produce sections … including a wide selection of sprouts. Yet they can be a bit on the pricy side. Even in these wonderful stores, sprouts typically cost about $3.50 for a 4 ounce container.

Compare this to growing your own sprouts at home. One of the seed distributers that I purchase from sells their sprout seed for about $4.00 an ounce. Note: that’s an ounce of SEED not an ounce of SPROUTS, and therein lies the difference. Just a tablespoon of seed produces 2-3 cups of sprouts. So, without mangling the United States’ Imperial measuring system too much, you’re looking at gaining 5 times the amount of sprouts for the same amount of money by growing your sprouts at home.

Food-Safety Concerns

Grocery stores are wonderful because they allow us to purchase the foods that we can’t grow. However, there’s also an element of trust that comes with that transaction. How safe is the food that your purchasing? Can you trust – sight unseen – the growers, packagers, distributers, stockers, etc. to deliver food that you will consume and feed to your family? It’s hard not to get a little jaded when every day there’s a new news story about some food recall of some kind.

Sprouts are, unfortunately, an easy target for bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. These are two of the most prevalent reasons for food recalls on produce. By growing your own sprouts from home, you have total control of how clean and food-safe your sprouts are. (This means you can also screw it up, but hey, that’s in your control too).

Environmental Benefits

As mentioned earlier, unlike microgreens, sprouts don’t require soil to grow. They are entirely hydroponic. This means that they have an extremely low-resource requirement. Give sprouts a place to grow with enough water to get them started, and they’ll do the job for you.

Regularly changing out the water in your tiny hydroponic garden is a must, of course. Standing water is a big no-no in general, and for growing sprouts in specific. You want to reduce even the possibilty of mold growth on your sprouts. Changing the water every day or so is the easiest way to mitigate mold.

Plus, changing the water regularly means you’ll also have the added environmental benefit of a little extra oxygen in your kitchen. That slight scent of healthy, green, growing things in your kitchen always adds a little something extra to a busy day.

Types of Sprouts to Grow

Lots of different kinds of vegetables can be grown and harvested as sprouts. Each has their own subtle flavor profile. Each lends their own unique addition to certain dishes. We will often plan our meals and then decide when to start our sprouts based on which sprouts will best accent the meal plan.

Some wonderful sprout options include:

• Alfalfa – General green awesomesauce. Good for just about anything. Including just adding to smoothies for an extra nutritional punch.
• Beans – There’s a lot of different kinds of bean sprouts. Each carries its own flavor. Bean sprouts are great in falafels, on salads, tacos, or burritos.
• Lentils – Not only can they behave like bean sprouts, steamed, they can be a side-dish of their own. Plant protein for the win with these babies.
• Broccoli – Salads. OMG, salads. Or tacos, or sandwiches, or on steaks, or steamed. Honestly, is there anything broccoli sprouts can’t do?
• Radish – For an added kick of spice to any meal, radishes are the way to go. Plus, their red stems add the interest of color to their dishes, enticing not only taste but sight as well.
• Onion – For a more subdued flavor than their mature counterparts, onion sprouts offer a hint of sharpness without the overbearing aftertaste. Great for steaks.
• Fenugreek – Honestly, the seeds themselves smell like maple syrup, and the sprouts maintain that sweet aftertaste when grown. Excellent on a steak or barbeque, these sprouts really stand in a league of their own.

Ways to Grow Sprouts

There are two main methods for growing sprouts. And there’s some benefits and downsides to both methods.

Mason Jar

For the true D.I.Y.er, the mason jar method is the way to go. You don’t need much. Just grab a mason jar and a thin cloth (a cheese cloth is best). With a little bit of seed and water, you’re ready to grow!

Benefits

SOOO cost-effective. All you need is a mason jar, a cloth, seed, and water. Boom. Done.

Downsides

Because the seeds spend their lives basically trapped inside glass, there’s reduced airflow around them. This can lead to greater chances of mold.

Plus, in a mason jar, it can be difficult to extract the sprouts once they’re ready for harvest.

Also, you’ll need one mason jar for each kind of sprout that you’re going to grow. So if you’re intending to grow more than one kind of sprout for different meals, each mason jar will take up counter space in your kitchen.

Sprouting Trays

A little investment early can lead to a host of rewards to reap later (and sprouts to reap, of course, but that’s a given).

Benefits

Because trays are more open to the air, there’s improved airflow around the sprouts. This means that there’s less (though not no) chance of mold to harm the sprouts as they’re growing in their hydroponic space.

Trays can be stacked on top of one another. This means that growing sprouts in this way is incredibly space-efficient. If you want sprouts for a smoothie but also sprouts for your steak one night this week, you can grow them one on top of the other with no issues.

Ease of harvest is a wonderful reason to grow sprouts in trays. Most tray towers that you can purchase have removable sections so you can take them to the kitchen sink to harvest them with little to no issues.

Downsides

Cost is the main downside to sprouting trays, since you’ll likely purchase the equipment from an online retailer. This is largely a one-time purchase, however. Buy it once, and the trays will serve for years — as long as you don’t put them in the dishwasher (most sprout trays are not dishwasher safe). The sprouting tower I use [Bioset Germinator Kit from Johnny’s Seeds] (unaffiliated) is currently priced at $37.50.

Growing Sprouts with the Tray Sprouting Method

I’ll probably touch on the mason jar method of growing sprouts in a later article. Simply because I haven’t had as much success with that method. In my experience, a sprouting tower is well-worth the investment if your household eats as many sprouts as mine does.

Sprouting trays act a little like starting your garden seeds indoors early in the spring. The difference is that you’re focused on the sprouts themselves, not accounting for how they’ll eventually grow into full plants.

How Many Seeds to Sprout?

How many seeds you use depends largely on what kind of sprouts you’re growing. Larger sprouting seeds (like fenugreek, for example) will need more seeds to achieve the same bulk of sprouts than smaller seeds (like onion seeds).

In general, a good rule of thumb is to use 0.5 to 1 tablespoon of sprout seeds to get 1 to 3 cups of sprouts.

How Much Water Do Sprouts Need to Grow?

Sprouts don’t need a lot of water to get started. Covering your sprout seed with about a half-inch of water is generally enough to commence germination.

The trick with water is to keep it clear. In the case of sprouting trays and/or towers, regularly adding water ever other day will keep the water moving and discourage mold from taking hold.

Do Sprouts Need Sunlight?

Strangely enough, sprouts actually do not require sunlight to germinate and grow. After all, think about it. Most seeds, especially the kind harvested as sprouts, are generally designed to grow in soil before they ever see the sun.

For best flavor, however, sprouts should be exposed to sunlight at least a day before harvesting. This will help the chlorophyl to begin producing and add the tasty green flavor to your sprouts.

How Long Do Sprouts Take to Grow?

Sprouts are remarkably quick to grow. This is excellent for short-term meal planning. Want to have friends over for an amazing grill-out of steaks on Sunday? Start your sprouts on the Sunday before and you’ll have fresh restaurant-quality sprouts to garnish your game-day meats in 7 days.

Ways to Enjoy Your Home-Grown Sprouts

Honestly, writing this article has made me a little hungry! And why not? Sprouts are the perfect addition to a lot of different dishes. Boring middle-ground meals suddenly level up with fresh sprouts added to the mix. I’ve mentioned some of these above, but here are some of our favorites:

• Tacos
  • Fish, chicken, steak, pork … it really doesn’t matter what you’ve got cooking. Add some sprouts to the mix and you’ve got yourself an incredible meal.
• Salads
  • Level up your humble salad with some fresh sprouts thrown in. Spice it up with radishes or onions. Or lean in to a sweet flavor with fenugreek or clover.
• Steamed
  • You have to have a lot of sprouts for this one, as they will reduce down a bit with heat. But lightly steamed sprouts can add a layer of complexity to any plate. Plus, adding heat to sprouts makes them a little easier to digest.
• Steaks
  • Garnish your steaks like a restaurant maverick. Got some gorgonzola or blue cheese chunks? Melt that cheese on your steaks and garnish with onion, radish, bean, or fenugreek sprouts for an added trip to casa elegance.
• Stir-fry
  • Let’s not forget the amazing addition sprouts make to stir-fry! Sprouts live to be included in oriental cuisine. Toss them in at the end to lightly wilt them, but keep their crunchiness for added texture.
• Smoothies
  • Don’t discount the humble smoothie. Those refreshing post-run, after-workout, on-the-go road warrior beverages are ultra enhanced by the extra vitamins and antioxidants from a few sprouts blended in.

Sprout Into Action

Growing your own sprouts at home is not only an affordable way to add fresh, nutritious greens to your diet but also an eco-friendly and sustainable practice. Whether you choose to sprout in a mason jar or try out the tray method, the process is simple and requires minimal time and effort. From crunchy toppings for salads and sandwiches to nutrient-packed additions for smoothies and stir-fries, the versatility of sprouts is unmatched.

Once you’ve tried growing your own, you’ll see why this easy, space-saving method has become a favorite among health-conscious gardeners and home cooks alike. So grab some seeds, and start sprouting your way to a healthier, greener lifestyle.