How to Grow Sprouts with Water Or in Soil Any Time of The Year at Got Sprouts

This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today I have a very exciting episode for you. We're here actually late night, after my busy work day, to film another episode for you guys, and this is going to be a very important one. A lot of times, like we had in the last video, I get people asking, 'hey, John, what's a crop I could grow indoors in the wintertime and have a enough to eat,' you know, 'like a salads worth of food, of my own food, that I can grow every day that I can eat and harvest sustainably in the wintertime, or even indoors?' so, I mean, it's nighttime right now and there's a lot of growing on in the place behind me. We're here in Riviera Beach in Florida at gotsprouts, and gotsprouts ships fresh sprouts to you but they also sell the paraphernalia you will need to grow your own fresh sprouts at home. Next, we're going to go inside gotsprouts and we're going to show you how they're growing sprouts inside a big warehouse building but more importantly, we're going to show you how to grow different sprouts such as broccoli sprouts, alfalpha sprouts, clover sprouts, and little sprouters, but also we're going to show you how to grow the most powerful green sprouts. Now, the green sprouts are the sprouts that are grown in soil. Some people may call them microgreens. Today we're going to show you sunflower greens, which is actually very simple and very easy. You can source the seeds actually at the local Wal-Mart, and maybe we'll tell you about hat in a minute, but we're going to show you how you can grow one pound of salad greens, or sunflower sprouts, that you can harvest each and every day on a cycle. So, every day you'll have a pound of sprouts and have a delicious sprout salad to fill in in the wintertime when you're not able to grow outside. So, let's head into gotsprouts and learn about growing some sprouts. Now, we're inside gotsprouts and this is a little storefront area. I mean, the magic happens in the back where everything is growing but this is where customers can come in to learn more about buying the sprouts, juicing the sprouts, and even try the sprouts, but more importantly, buy the seeds, the sprouting supplies so that you can grow your own sprouts at home. Of course, if you don't want to grow your own, gotsprouts sells to stores and farmers markets and will even sell direct to you through air shipping. So, that's pretty amazing, but we're going to do today is we're actually going to get a behind the scenes tour to show you guys how they're growing inside this warehouse building, and then maybe after that we're going to show you how you guys could grow your own sprouts at home. So, let's head on back to the warehouse and check it out. Now we're in the gotsprouts, literally the warehouse, where they have actually I think nice full spectrum lighting, but just ambient light, there's no lights directly on top o the sprouts and what we're going to do now is actually I'm going to pick up the camera and follow Sean around, who is the master sprout grower here, and he's been doing it for 6 years and he's going to take us around and show us some of the different sprouts he's growing, how he's doing it, and in just a little bit he's going to show you how you can grow sprouts, too. So, John, the first thing we have when you're coming through here is buckwheat. We've got lots of buckwheat lettuce going on. This is probably about 3 or 4 days old right now, and when this thing is done it's going to be about 6 or 7 pounds of sprouts in one little tray here. The thing probable weighs about 30 or 40 pounds right now so if I fall down during this interview, we know why. I love buckwheat sprouts. Definitely really good, or actually buckwheat lettuce. These are so tender. Is that why they're called lettuce, because, I mean, unlike sunflower greens, these guys are nice and thin like lettuce would be, right? Correct, yes. They have these little hulls on them, too. So, you might want to take them, put them in a bucket of water so the hulls pop off, clean them, ready to go. Great. What are we going to look at next? We're going to see these sprouts over here. These are baby pea sprouts. These are green peas, and they're growing with a speckled pea seeds and you can actually, when you go in there a little but loser there, you can actually see how large these seeds actually are, and they take about 5-7 days actually to get be about this tall. We usually harvest them at this point. It's kind of in the idle of being used for juicing, so most people that buy them usually get the juicer at 5-7 inches tall or even 8 inches depending on how far you want to go. So, these are the baby sprouts here for the pea sprouts, and we cut them pretty short there for you and they're going to be very tender at this stage. As they get older, they're going to be more fibrous and they're going to be more for juicing. At this point you can use them for salads, you can put them on sandwiches, you can do a lot of different things with them that's just really tasty, and they're really, really good for you. So, Sean, do you know what kind of pea sprouts those are? Are they shell peas, like sugar snap peas, I mean, what? It's actually called speckled pea is actually the breed of seed that you can use for this, and it's just really good. They call the pea the complete food. If you're stranded on a desert island, you and live off these things, that's how much vitamins are in this. Very good for protein, very good for amino acids profile. It's everything you want in them. So, let's move on to the sunflower, over here. So, what are we looking at here? John, this is about 2-3 days old at this point, and then is when the tray is actually being pushed. Usually we put a lot of weight on this, but this tray is going to be used to flip this over at this point. So, you can see it's still yellow, so it hasn't greened up at this point. It's pushed up the tray, and that means it's telling you to go ahead and flip this over. You want to leave this on top and it's going to continue to grow, it's going to keep the spouts still moist, and it's going to continue to grow at that point. When this pushes up to about here, when you can actually see the sprouts again, that's when you want to take it up and start bringing it out, and this is the day after. It's amazing, and they'll grow 3-4 inches in a day. And once again, you shouldn't put direct light overhead. Just, you know, as long as there's ambient light in your room like there is here in the walls and up on your ceiling there, it's going to be fine, right? Yea. You're looking for indirect light. Any root that you can see yourself in is enough light. Now, I'm noticing that I'm getting wind blowing in here. Is there a reason for all the fans and all the air circulation? You want to keep the air circulating all the time. I try to keep it, you're probably looking between 70 and 75 degrees in there and you want to keep the air flowing to keep any mold coming on. So, if somebody's growing at home, do they need all the fans or should they blow some fans on the sprouts in the trays or what? Sure. Depending on what temperature you're growing in. If you're growing in over 80 degrees, you have to put a fan on it because it's too hot, and you have to figure the seeds are coming from the upper Midwest, like Nebraska and Oregon and places like that, so it's used to cold weather. It does well in cold. So, when you get to 70-80 degrees, once you're over 80 degrees, you're going to start working with mold. So, if they're below 80 degrees, 75 degrees, you would say they don't need a fan? No, not necessarily, but if you grow on a large scale, you're going to have a lot of humidity, so that's why we have the fans going all the time. This is our baby sunflowers. This thing weighs about 150 pounds, so I may buckle any second now, but these babies are full of life and they're ready to go. Great for salads. We actually do a sun salad, which has sunflower, pea greens, and sprouted bean mix on top of it. You take a little oil and vinegar, put it over the top, just eat it the way it is, it's fantastic. We call that the sun salad. So, how many pounds of sprouts are on there, if you were to harvest that? You'd get about 4 pounds out of this. Alright, 4 pounds of sprouts, 1 tray. That's al to of food for one tray. Next we're going to move over to the wheatgrass. Wow. You guys have a lot of wheatgrass growing over here. What do you guys do with all that? We cut it, mow it, whatever you want to do with it, but you could basically take this out and it's great for juicing. You want to juice your wheatgrass, you don't want to put it on salads, you don't want to eat that straight out, because you're not going to be able to digest it. Someday we'll be a cow and we can do that, but this is the wheatgrass. This is about 2 or 3 days before it's ready to harvest at this point. You want to harvest it at what they call the jointing stage. That's when the second leaf starts to come up. We usually harvest it just about the day before the jointing stage, and I usually tell by the sight. If you can see, some of the wheatgrass it starting to get a little hairy where they start spreading out the sides, and that's when you want to harvest the entire tray at that point. So, you take that, you juice it up, it's extremely good for you. It's an oxidant agent, it purifies the blood, and it's just a natural blood cleanser. Baby wheatgrass. So, how old is this stage here? It's about 3 days. You want to talk to use about the root zone and how that works? So, what the soil does and if it absorbs all the nutrients in the soil or if that's mold in the soil or what's going here. Sure. If you take a look at the actually soil here, do you see the white kind of a cobweb effect you have there? That's actually the root system of the wheatgrass. This is actually the sugars of the plant, as you get down here. In about 4 or 5 days, there will be no soil left. All the nutrients will be in the plant and it's all going to eat that soil right up. So, here's we're looking about 5 to 6 days here, and if I lift this up, you can see there's very little soil left. It's just eating the soil away. By the time it's ready to harvest, there won't be any soil left. So, you don't want to replant once you do this. Just go ahead and throw the pad out and get a new one to plant again. So, yea. They should compost their pads out and then use that soil in tier garden. Sure. Absolutely. And how much will one flat of this stuff make in juice, like if you're going to juice that. If you're doing a whole tray like these, you're going to get 2 pounds. So, if you got 2 pounds, you're going to be 20-24 ounces of juice. So, that right there is going to produce- This'll last you about 2 weeks if you're doing 2 ounces a day. Wow. So, that's 24 ounces of juice right there. That's a lot of juice. A lot of juice to be carrying around. So, this is about the fully-grown one here, and what you want to do is you want to look for what they call the jointing stage. I'll show you how that works. The jointing stage is really where the second leaf is starting to come off. Sorry my hands are dirty, bear with me. If you can see that second leaf just about to sprout right there. You see that? It's right there. You can see it's kind of like coming off. See how it comes out like that? It's just to kind of show you an easier view. It looks something like this. Once that second leaf starts coming out, you want to go ahead and cut the entire tray there. That's at top nutritional value for wheatgrass. Let it grow to the next day, it ages like 40 years and it starts drooping like this. So, is that tray ready to be harvested like tomorrow? This is ready to be harvested like this. Tomorrow morning it'll be ready to go. And then once you guys harvest it, how do you guys store it after that? You can store it in Debbie Myer Green Bags. It'll last about 7-10 days in the refrigerator. So, you can use it up through that and you're going to go through it in about 5 or 6 days. It never gets to where it goes bad. It does continue to grow in the refrigerator, even though it's only low growth. Even after it's cut? Even after it's cut. Wow. It's very resilient plant. What if I wanted to grow a lawn of wheatgrass here? Could I get a lot of seed and grow this as a lawn and keep mowing it and it'll keep coming back? I've actually met a guy who actually took a jersey, a football jersey, soaked in water, soaked the seed, and planted the seed on the jersey and walked around with it and was actually growing wheatgrass out of his jersey. It's amazing stuff you can do with this. For Halloween or whenever you want to have a good party. I hope you enjoyed that behind the scenes tour that Sean just gave us. As you can see, behind me, the sunflower greens are on this metal rack, but they also have a lot of PVC racks that are just growing basically on a PVC tubing that they pout together to make racks, which is very inexpensive. So, you could do that at home, or you could buy metal racks like this, but there's no point in building a rack unless you're going to know how to grow the sprouts. So, next we're going to go over to the store area and you're going to learn how to grow sprouts in water, and also the varied sunflower greens you're seeing behind me so that you can grow them every single day of the wintertime so you'll produce a nice large salad that you can eat. Now we're inside gotsprouts with Sean the owner and master grower here. He's the master sprout man. I'm your grass man. He's the grass man, and he's been growing commercially in this commercial scale for 6 years, and that's a long time. So, that's why I'm here. I'm here to learn form the exert that's been doing this. This is his livelihood, and if you're doing it as you're livelihood, you're going to optimize and do the best you can, and he definitely has some beautiful sprouts here. So, what Sean's going to do today is he's going to introduce you to some of the different sprouts, the 2 different ways you can grow sprouts, in soil or in water, and a few things he like to do that with. The primary thing that I want to show you guys that is really the most sustainable for sprouts, in my opinion, are the green sprouts. They contain the chlorophyll, and they're basically like miniature plants. I mean, in fact, they're being call microgreens now. So, Sean, why don't you take over and tell us about this easy sprout and tell us about some of the beans and some of the smaller seeds that you can sprout in water. Sure, John. It's just kind of keeping it simple for people. So, they're trying to do a home garden, basically. So, you're trying to figure out different ways you want to grow in you're kitchen, so we kind of set up a little kitchen area here. We're going to kind of show you a couple different ways that you can do this. First of all, it depends on the kind of seed that you're going to be growing and how you're going to be sprouting. You can sprout in soil. You can also sprout in water using this easy sprouter. You can use mason jars. You can use nut bags. There's a lot of different ways to sprout, but if you want to keep it simple, this is one of the simplest ways I've ever recommended to people to try. The first thing I'm going to show you is actually how to grow the bean sprouts. Bean sprouts are probably the easiest ones to sprout at home. So, we put together this little mixture of bean sprouts here. I don't know if you can see that real close or not, but it's got auk mum beans, garbanzos, red lentil and green lintel in there. You mix them up, you can make hummus out of it, you can do a lot of different things with the bean mix, but the firs thing we want to do is sprout it, obviously. We're going to be using the easy sprouter to go ahead and do the bean mix here. So, the first thing we're going to do is right here. It's just basic, empty little bucket part of it, and it has a slotted bucket in the inside of it. I don't know I you can see that part of it, but we're going to pull this back and you're gin got drop this inside, you're going to take some of the bean mix, take it out of the package here. So, tell us about, you know, the different mixes you guys have. Like, can somebody goes down to their local health food store to sprout those, or should they buy it form, you know, you guys, 'cause you guys have the special ones, right? Yea, we do have some fantastic seed and whatever you're sprouting, you're looking for the best viable seeds you can get, and when we actually sell the same seeds as the (unclear) health institute uses. So, we know it's really good. They use it for their health facility. They've used it for 50 years. So, we use the same farms that they use. So, that's the reason why we have the most viable seed in the business. So, if you want to get a bean mix, there's lots of different mixes you can get. You can go over to Harry's Sprout, which they have broccoli, alfalpha, clover, radish, and things like that, grown the same way. Bean sprouts, I like to start with people when they're just getting ready to do it because it's the simplest ones to do. Very simple here. You're going to pour a little bit in. You're going to get 1:2 out of this. So, whatever 1 you put in there, you're going to get twice as much. When you go to broccoli, when you go to clover or radish, when you put 1 teaspoon in there, you're going to get 5 times as much. Wow, so they really expand. They really do, and the cool thing, I mean, why do you sprout? Why do you eat sprouts? It's the most nutritious food on the planet. When you have these little seeds here, and you can see the seeds, they have a certain amount of energy in them, but when you actually sprout them, it's actually 6 times as much energy. So, it's like a 2 year old. I was telling people, it's like a 2 year old. You ever chase a 2 year old around? He runs all over the place. I wish I had the energy, right? Is that the first thing you say? No, I outrun him. Do you? Good man. He's eating the sprouts. I love this guy. I eat a lot of greens and my sprouts, too. It's the same thing. I have a little 2 year old running around all the time and I'm saying, 'God, I wish I could catch this kid.' Well, that's what these are. This is pure energy that you're consuming. So, you want to take a little bit of this, you want to pour some in there, and if you want to be specific, again you get a 1:2. So, it depends on how many people you have in the family, maybe you want to do half of it, maybe you want to do a quarter of it, depending on how many people you want. Like, how much do you sprout? Do you sprout the whole thing full or just half full or? You probably want to do half, since it's going to expand, 'cause if you do half of it, it's going to expand the whole way through. So, I usually do about this much, which is about a quarter full, and you're going to get twice as much. So, you're going to be just about ¾ of the way full by the time you're done there. So, again, you just pour it in the bottom there, you're going to soak it in some water. We got some water back here. We just fill it up. Now, he's just filling it up, and once again anybody can do this in their kitchen, whether you go the easy sprouter or you use a mason jar with, you know, a lid, a screw on lid with the mesh on it. They do offer these tools at their website, which we'll mention at the end. Okay, so we're soaking this. You're going to soak this overnight. Right before you of to bed, out your seeds in, soak it overnight, go to sleep. You wake up and the first thing you do in the morning is you're going to take this over to the sink, and you're going to lift up and you see all the water that's coming out the bottom? It's got the slotted bottom there for you. So, it keeps it simple. You shake it up really good, pour the water out, and you've got your seeds all set up in there. So, here's you go, you've got your seeds in the bottom, you've soaked them all night, then you want to take it, you want to put it into the easy sprouter, and it's got a little ledge there that you can set it up like this, and I don't know if you can see that. Let me show you real close. It sits up on the ledge here, and what that does is it creates confectioned air gets underneath the seeds and gets through the seeds and the heat of it actually expanding and sprouting will actually help it sprout even quicker. So, then about, say another 6-8 hours, you can start getting little tails off of all these little bean sprouts, and then you just drop it in, put the vented top on top, put it right in the fridge, and you've got yourself a little meal ready to go. Pull it out any time you want to, put it on salads, put it on soups, anything you want to add a crunch to, sandwiches, however you want to do it, just pull that out, pull a little bit out, put it on your sandwiches, whatever you want to do. And that was like one day, right? Well, you're going to go to bed at night. So, that's 12 hours you're soaking it. You wake up in the morning, you're going to drain it out, you're going to rinse it once probably during the day. That night you can put it in the fridge. So, it's probably about 24-30 hours or so. I see. In 1- 1 ½ days you can be growing your own sprouts. Everybody can do one of this in their kitchen real easy. I think one of the most important things about this system that I like is the airflow. Now, tell us if something doesn't have enough air flow, what's going to happen? You're going to get your mold, you're going to get you're mold, you're going to get the bad smelling, you're not going to want to try it. So, how can you tell if you're sprouts are bad? What, you just smell it and if it smells alright then it's probably good, but if smells nasty don't even chance it? I always tell you, rinse it out real good. If you have any smell to it, then you might just want to take it and throw it out and start all over again. Actually, even better, throw them outside, see if they'll grow into a plant. I've done that before. Throw them in your compost and see if they'll give a garbanzo bean plant or something. Actually, that happened to me. It did. Actually, I grew them in a little pot. I was like, 'I'm not going to eat these. Let's see if they grow.' It's the future hummus of the world. So, actually- Alright, so how do these other things go? I mean, I see you got like the radish sprouts, or radish seeds here, broccoli seeds. I mean, there's all kinds of different seeds you can grow. Mung beans. Here's the sunflower, which is going to be for later, the clover, alfalpha. The other thing I want to tell you guys, if you buy these seeds, you can buy them here, and say you just wan to grow a clover. Clovers are a great cover crop. It's also edible as a sprout or even when it gets taller, we can eat it, you can buy you're seeds form like a sprout house like this and just grow these in your garden and it actually buying broccoli for sprouting is a lot cheaper than buying just a small pack of broccoli seed, but then you'll never know exactly what kind of broccoli you're going to get, but then they also have whole buckwheat here and this is actually used for sprouting in this style, but not growing for the greens. So, next thing you could do, John, if you want to get into the broccoli, the clover, the alfalpha, radishes, these seeds actually get 1:5. So, what you can do is you take a teaspoon, just pour a little bit on there, dip it in there, and you're going to get 5 times as much when you're done with it. What we recommend is you go to bed, obviously you soak it over night, you wake up in the morning, you rinse it really good, you're going to rinse it a couple times a day for about 2 days, and then you're going to start to see the sprouting coming out, and it's really, I wish that I had some sprouting here for us so that you could take a look at it, but you can see the actual root system coming out the bottom here, and they'll get as tall as this, and if you want to kind of bring them up, you can bring them next to the window, that'll bring them up really good. Rinse them out really good every day, and then say if you have your clover or your alfalpha and it has these little seed on top of it. So, what you want to do if you have a salad spinner, you can take that, put it in a bowl of water, pour it in the salad spinner, spin it around real good, and then you can wipe out the inside to get all the hulls out of it and then it's good to go, you put it right back into the sprouter, put the top on, put it right back And what's the total time elapsed on those guys? Probably about 2 days. Wow. So, 2 days to have your own broccolis sprouts in your kitchen, or you could buy them in a little 2 ounces package for I don't even know $3-4. You'll save a lot of money. So, you'll save a lot of money just by growing a garden. You're going to actually save even more money by growing your own spouts, actually. And the taste. And the taste is phenomenal. Especially if you go organic seeds as opposed to commercial grown seeds. The flavor of the radish, it spikes, it's amazing. There's another thing, too. You can take the alfalpha, the clover, the broccoli, experiment. Try some new reactions, mix them up. Throw some radish in there. You're going to love the flavors. Then try arugula just by itself. It's very, very great. I mean, it's a peppery light flavor. It's just amazing. So, there's lots of different things you can do. Experiment. Have some fun with it. Wow. So, yea. Within one day, maybe 2, you could have your own sprouts, ready to eat, growing in your kitchen that you grew with your very own hands, So, another question people might have is hey how do you use the sprouts? I know I would personally just eat all the sprouts in a big salad and out some salad dressing on it or make a salad dressing, maybe add it to my lettuce if I have lettuce, or just eat a whole sprout salad of different kinds of sprouts. I mean, it's probably one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. What are some other ways that people can use there sprouts there, Sean? You can out them in obviously salads is what most people will use them for, but wrap sandwiches, I put them on top any time. I put them in my soup. I take my crunchy bean mix and up it in my soup to give some crunch to it. You can make hummus with it, you can make patés with it. There's a lot of different things you fan do with it. The other thing I'll do is I'll actually get some nori, I'll put the nori sheet and then I'll put a bunch of sprouts in there, just kind of some avocado, and some dolts and just roll that up into a nice little wrap. I'm hungry. I mean, I'm hungry, too. I didn't eat dinner yet, either. So, you just learned how to grow the sprouts in the water, such as all the sprouts you just saw. Now, that's absolutely the easiest, 'cause you don't need any dirt, you don't need any anything. You just need a little spreading appliances such as a mason jar or something. I've even used colanders when I'm on vacation from the condo, you know, that I'm living in. actually, the buckwheat, I like to sprout the whole buckwheat in just a colander, you know, 'cause the seeds are so big they won't actually go through the colander. It's just very simple, but this is the easiest way to sprout bar none, nut even better, in my opinion, than sprouting in water, is actually growing the greens, 'cause once again, my show is called growingyourgreens, and whether they're buckwheat greens, sunflower greens, wheatgrass, or, you know, pea greens, they're also greens that are baby plants, also people are calling them microgreens. You could do arugula like this and other radishes and other crops, you know, grow them into greens. Now, what we're gin got do is we're going to show you how to grow in tray and this is the ay you could do it o that you can have food and like literally a pound of food every day throughout the wintertime if you can't grow outside in the winter and in the trays and in the basically the soil what we're going to grow in, you could grow a few things such as the pea greens, you could grow wheatgrass fi you're going to juice it. I don't necessarily recommend making salad out of wheatgrass unless you're a cow, the buckwheat so you can grow buckwheat greens, but my favorite, actually, is these sunflower greens and that's what we're going to show you today. It's also the hardest from what Sean said. So, Sean, why don't you take it away and show us how the experts do it? Okay. Thanks, John. Well, first thing you want to do is you want to decide to get the best organic seeds you could possible find and then you want to give us a call here at gotsprouts because we definitely got the best seed there is. It's the most viable seed and you can see why. This is what you get when you're finished. So, we're going to start showing you how to do this. This is about 4 pounds of food right here. So, you could do the large tray, but you should start off small and grow big. We grow commercially so it's a little bit on a bigger scale, but we're going to start off small, and this is the setup I tell people when they first come in to gotsprouts is, 'hey I want to grow sunflower, I want to grow pea greens, I want to grow wheatgrass or buckwheat or any of these soil-based sprouts,' we're going to show you how to do it in a small little setup like this. The first thing you want to do is you want to get a tray that has no holes in it. See? No holes. This is a 10X20 tray, and I call this the large tray. The reason is has no holes in it is because you want to catch the water and that's what it's for, and this is kind of a whole little sprout kits that I set up for you, and you want tog et one of the smaller trays, and this is a 10X10 tray, a nice little square fits perfectly right inside. See how that goes? It fits perfectly right inside there. You can actually have 2 of these going right inside there, so I'm going to show you that a little bit later, but just to get you started, this is going to grow you one pound of sunflower, one pound of wheatgrass, one pound of buckwheat. It'll grow you a little bit less, so probably about ½ pound, of pea because the pea seeds are so large. So, that's kind of what you're looking for to get out of these, and what you want to put into it, obviously you want to start off with a good quality organic soil. So, do you use like a potting mix or like is there garden soil or what do you? Well, we have ecomagic soil here that we sell here, and it's 40-pound bags for $10. It's pretty inexpensive, but you can get about 10 trays out of that. You're going to get 20 trays of this out of a 40-pound bag. Lamberts is a good medium if you're going to go to home depot, if you have a Home Depot near you, or Scott's Brand. You're looking for an organic soil. The thing I like about Lamberts is that it's a very light soil because they put about half peat moss in there. So, it's going to be very easy to use. So, should it be a potting or garden soil, 'cause there's a big difference in like the mixtures. It's a garden soil, is what you need. So, a garden soil, not a potting mix, and this stuff looks very dark and very rich, and that's the other thing, you know. You want to get a nice dark, rich soil to use to grow in. You're going to put about 2 inches of dirt in here and just to kind of show you what that look like, it's about 2 inches here and we're going o take that and we're going to kind of spread your hand over the top of it just to kind of level it out for you. Then you're going to take that other tray that you have on top, you're going to push it down and make it nice and flat like so. So, now we have our little rows to put our seeds in. I'm just kidding. Okay, so next thing, we're going to soak our seed overnight and the next morning we're going to wake up and rinse it out really good and it's ready to plant at that point. You can leave it in the inside the bucket for a while until it gets little sprouts on the bottom of it. It'll be a little white sprout, and right now you can see a few of them that are sprouting. Sean, before you add that in there, how many pounds do you soak in there that you're going to be spreading out? For the half tray, you're going to use about ½ pound of seeds. So, if you're using the wheatgrass, you're obviously going to use a pound. If you're using the pea sprouts, you're going to use a ½ pound. The sunflower, you're going to use a little less than that because they're larger seeds. I'd say a little bit over ¼ a little less than ½ pound, but 12 pound is a good gage to measure it by. So, you want o take this and you're going to sprinkle it back and forth and the whole idea is you want to cover the entire amount of soil with this seeds. Should they be touching each other or overlapping or what? You just want to find some space. As long as you're covering the soil, it'll be fine. So, even if you have 2 on top of each other, they'll find they're way. I'll show you one that's completely done. This is what it looks like when it's done. You're completely covered. So, you cover the soil, you want to put it on there, stick it right in there. The thing is with sunflower, sunflower likes pressure. I've been told that if you put a tray on top of this and you stood on it, it will pick you up eventually, that's how strong these sprouts are. You'd be standing in one place for a long time. So, if you have time, you know. Jump right in. So, again, you want to take another tray, put some soil on it. This one's already done, so I'm going to use it, put some soil, pack it down like we showed you earlier, and then take that and put it on top of the seed like that. So, you see how that's staked on there? You want to water real good first. So, you want to keep the soil and the seed moist through the whole time. So, you want to lift this up, water it real good. So, when you water it, Sean, do you use like a little spray bottle, mister? Do you like a rain can, like water plants? Like what do you use? I recommend a ran can, reason being it's a lot more water, obviously. The spritzer is good once these start getting a little taller, but you want to saturate that soil and you want to make sure it stays nice and moist. You want to seed to stay moist all the way through. Okay. So, then you've got next morning, you wake up, and every morning you're going to wake u and water this pretty good. Let the water drip into this pan. You can pull this up if you want. I keep mine right next to my sink at home and I just dump it up, and you just drop this back in here. So, I see you got this now and we got, you know, 2 trays on top. Can you grow 2 trays on top and put another one on top and have a bunch growing? Absolutely. You got a family 4, obviously you're going to have to grow a lot more and just keep stacking them on top of each other, but you can go 3 or 4 or 5 or however many. And when you take these weights off or how does that work? What's next? Well, basically, in about 2 or 3 days, this is actually going to lift right up so we can actually see the sprouts coming from underneath. Once you see that, you want to take the pressure off at that point and then take an empty tray, cover it like this, and you're going to be at this stage right here. So, what we have behind us is actually his commercial growing that he grows to sell, actually and it's quite a bit of money to buy some sprouts, but if you can't grow them, I recommend you buy them instead of not eat them and we're going to do a close-up now to show you guys the stages of what they should look like when you're growing them. This is actually the first day right here. When you've actually sprouted your seeds and you've planted them. You see the little white tails coming out of the bottom? Those are actually the sprouts. Those are going to become the root system. So, you've planted them like this. The next day you're going to water them real good, the next day they'll start looking like this. In about 2-3 days, you're going to start getting them like this and we recommend that at this point, when this is actually where it lifts up the tray and you can actually see the sprouts form underneath. At that point, you want to take the tray and flip it over like this, and what that's doing is that it's keep still keeping the soil moist and the seed moist. So, it's still pushing up the sprouts at this point. When that lifts this tray up, that's when you want to take this tray off and start greening them up. You see how this is not green at this point. This has just been uncovered this afternoon. Then you're going to go to the 3-4th day over here and you can see the sprouts starting to take shape. You can see on some of them the husks are starting to pop off, too. So, that means that some of them are starting to blossom up here and really, really starting to look nice and green. And how tall are they at this stage? You're looking at probably 2-3 inches at this point, and here over here is the 4-5 days. You're starting to see when they're starting to sprout right here. They're really starting to take off right now. While we're sitting here I keep hearing all these husks falling off. So, these guys are starting to reach for the sky right now and then this is the finished product when you're done. You're looking at about 6-7 days at this point. So, that's about 1 week, right? And how do you know when they're ready? When they're ready, they're actually going to have a second set of leaves that are starting to pop out right here, and it's really in the center of the leaf that you're starting to see the second start right there. Right in the middle there? See that? Once that's in, that's the time to harvest, 'cause you can actually keep these in the refrigerator. Once you cut them, you can store them in a Debbie Myer's Green Bad, put them in a Ziploc bag, poke little wholes in there, 'cause they do breathe and they do give off gases, so you want to give them a little air to breathe through there. Once you but them, up them in a Debbie Myer Green Bag, put them in the refrigerator, it'll last you about 7-10 days, and of course you're going to be going through them a lot quicker than that, especially for juicing or salads or other things like that, you'll go through a pound in probably 2-3 days. Alright, Sean. So, I have a few questions for you. So, you're optimally supposed to harvest them at this, especially as a commercial grower. You're growing them for poundage. This is actually where they're going to weigh the most, but if you want to harvest them at, you know, other stages? Can you harvest them right when they turn green when they're younger? Sure you can. Say like, so, for me, what I would do is actually start turning them when they're green, I'd probably wait until about this stage and I'd start clipping them and then, you know, hopefully I've used a lot of them. By the time they turn like this, I'd have used the whole tray because in my opinion, I don't want to put my sprouts in the fridge so like and cut them, because once you but them, then at that point the nutrition's been going up because they're sprouting but the cut point, you know, they teeter out with the nutrition, and then they start to go down. Now, of course, in the commercial business, you know, that's his money right there. So, he wants to make sure that you get good product that you're going to buy and they assure you do that, but I would encourage you to actually only up it and then use it right after you cut it. Now, of course, you don't want to get them too old after they get to this point because then they start getting all kind of funky. So, they get to this point, you're not suing them, but the rest, juice the rest, to get rid of them to make a nice delicious green juice or something. Keep it on your dining room table. I have a little tray about this size. I keep it in my kitchen, and when I'm done, it's about like this. Every time I want a salad I just cut some through, and will it grow back? Yes it will grow back. I wouldn't recommend taking the second growth because it's basically going to be eating all the soil at that point. All the nutrients are pretty much gone on the second growth. So, I would just keep it, cut it as you need it, take it off. This'll probably last you a day or two if you're using it for salad or juicing or things like that. You're going to wipe this out when you're done with it. Actually, I like the idea of keeping it on your table, making it handy. I mean, maybe you're eating eggs in the morning. Hey, cut some off and put some in you're eggs. Maybe you're eating a sandwich. Put some in your sandwich. Maybe you're just, you know, at your kitchen table doing some work. Grab some and start eating, snacking on them like you're in your garden, and this is the wintertime, even. Wow. You can do it anytime of the seasons. As long as you got natural light where you can see yourself in the room, that's enough light. The sunflower, you might want to green it up a little bit more in direct sunlight, but the wheatgrass, the pea, the buckwheat, they're all fine in any room that you can see yourself, that's enough light for this. So, how much light, say, you're just growing it in a room, it's nighttime now, how much light should they have, just like if you put them next to a window? Is that enough light for them? In a sunny window and what's the temperature you want it to be, also? You want to keep it below 80 degrees to keep away from mold, but as far as coolness, you can go anywhere from I'd say 65 a little bit up to 70, they're going to grow very slow, so at 70 you're looking at probably 9 or 10 days. So, the cooler it is, if you're cheap like me and don't heat your house up. You're going to take a little more time. You're going to take a little more time. So, what you might want to do is, I don't know, stick your dehydrator in a room and have your sprouts going in there. So, it's you're dehydrating some stuff but also at the same time you're growing your sprouts or maybe you want to out a heater in a room tog just grow your sprouts so they grow faster. You keep them 70-75, it's perfect temperature. Keep the humidity low, probably about 70-75 as well, and it'll be perfect temperature for that. So, we just learned how to grow the sunflower greens. It's very simple and very easy, but the problem is, people want to learn how to grow, like, one little small tray. What if somebody wants to grow one trays worth, which is like a pound of food every day, so that they could be eating a salad through the whole week? You could basically set this up. This'll grow you one pound, so by the time you're done with this, and what I usually do is I start one on Monday, I'll start another one on Thursday or Friday just to keep them going. So, you can actually stagger them so you can have some every day. If you're growing an ideal temperature, it can take you about 5-7 days to grow it. So, you figure one every other day, you're going to plant one. Or how about one? If you one every day would that? The goal is to get one pound a day. Would you like, just start one full? You do one pound a day. You do one pound a day, then you'd start like one little tray a day. So, as you harvest one, you're also putting a new one back to grow it, right? And if you just do one a day, you'll have 7 or maybe even 8, have an extra one just to have a little bit more. And if you got that down for a couple days, then you go in the business. I was growing them in my back patio for myself, and my friends go, 'hey, can I have some of that?' and as soon as you bring this. Every time I've gone to dinner I always take them and everyone goes, 'we want Sean to come,' 'we want Sean to come,' 'cause I always bring live food to it. So, I always bring a live tray or sunflower or a live tray of buckwheat or pea greens, and everyone cuts it and goes, 'wow, how do you do this?' So, you're going to end up going, 'okay, let me show you how to do it,' or just watch John and he'll tell you and you'll see us doing this, and it's amazing how quickly they'll catch on. So, the main thing was just to start with one, get it going pretty good, then start the next one the next day as you're harvesting, then you're going to have 7. You're just going to harvest one, make a new one, and it's just going to be a rotating cycle and you'll have all the different stages like we have here. So, it's definitely going to be really good and really easy once you get it all set up and dialed in. So, Sean, like, another thing that people might ask is they know that I'm into rock dust and remineralization of the soil. I see you have some ocean solution here, and I would recommend that you put ocean solution, you know, in the water that you water these with. Do you think that's a good idea or not? Absolutely, why not? If you can get more nutrients out of anything, I usually put them in there. By no means is this required. This is extra credit work, and in my opinion, it's going to make everything taste sweeter and just that much better. The more nutrients, the better it tastes. Thanks you for showing us how to grow sprouts in water and now also in the trays in soil. You know, it's absolutely really simple and real easy, but what if somebody wants to learn more about how to grow in a multitude of different ways? That's a big concept. A lot of people come in all the time and say, 'how am I going to do this? I have limited space. I don't have places for tray and things like that. How am I going to grow my sprouts?' and you talk about wintertime, you know, growing sprouts during the winter, being able to keep live food coming in all the time. There's no better way than to do this. We actually put together a video, and you can actually see how to grow in nut bag, how to grow in mason jars, how to grow in the easy sprouter. Lots of different ways that we can do it. I actually worked with Linda Freiser with (unclear) South Institute. She was Health Educating Director at one point, and she's got her own television show in Canada and she shows you a lot of different ways to sprout, and then I take you in the back of gotsprouts and actually show you hot do the sunflower, pea green, the buckwheat, and the wheatgrass. So, it's very simple and easy on the video, and it shows you a lot of different products you can use and different ways you can use it with. So, keeping it simple, and that's the whole idea. Keep it simple, enjoy it, enjoy your life. Alright, so if somebody has questions about growing sprouts, I mean, you've been doing this for along time. Obviously, you have all the knowledge like I have knowledge about growing outside. You know how to do inside gardening, and besides in the video, are there any other resources like maybe that you guys have online to answer any questions before they need to contact you? Absolutely. We just did finish video segments, and it's actually abut 84 questions, I think, that are frequently asked questions, people calling all the time saying, 'what about this, what about this, what about this?' Go to www.gotsprouts.com and you'll actually see all of our YouTube's on the right-hand side, and it has all of our FAQ, and it's about a minute for each question. It'll kind of go over it, very concise, and I worked with Michael Gorgonzi. He's a master (unclear), and he's there, and we did some really exciting and entertaining video for that. Okay. Great. Great. So, if somebody wants to buy some of these trays or the DVD or even some of your seeds. Now, once again I want to talk about the seeds for just a minute, 'cause seeds are so important, like, you can be like, you know, 'I tried to sprout, but it's not growing, what's the problem?' Well, you know, there's a lot of things, but one of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is the seeds. The seeds you're buying at the health food store are made for eating, not necessarily for sprouting. Although they may sprout, they may not grow as well, you may have mold or fungus problems. So, why should somebody buy the seed form you guys here? We guarantee our seed. We have the most viable seed there is that I know. We've searched high and low, we look, we go through about 5 or 6 different farms per year, on a seasonal basis. They get the freshest, most viable seeds there are. You definitely want to have some viable seeds, 'cause they're just going to bust out and grow better for you and you're going to actually grow more food with less headaches, 'cause if you get seeds that maybe aren't so good and you have a whole bad batch and you're like, 'oh, sprouting sucks, it doesn't work,' well, you didn't do it the best way you could. By getting the seed they're growing here, I mean, the seeds they sell you here are the same seeds that have kept them in business for the last 6 years. So, they definitely work well. We use them every day. So, you see the results. All this stuff looks great and I've tasted this stuff. So delicious. So, Sean if somebody wants to get in contact with you guys, how can they get ahold of you, what's you website, and all that good stuff? You go www.gotspouts.com, or you can give us a call at 5616899464. Alright, Sean. Well, great. Thank you. I've enjoyed my time spent with you and thank you for sharing your incredible wealth of knowledge on sprouting. I've appreciated it and hopefully my viewers will now start to grow indoors, during the wintertime, but also all year long, to supplement their outdoor gardening. Happy sprouting everybody. Alright, so, once again, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time and remember, keep on sprouting.