 Hi, and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So in today's video, I'm going to show you how you can grow your own microgreens and pea sprouts without using any soil. And today, my grandson, Henderson, is here with me. He is always great to try out any of the foods that I make. He seems to love everything from my garden. So today, we're going to give him his first taste of microgreens and pea sprouts. Yeah. So first of all, I'm going to show you how you can grow these without using any soil. And then we'll come back for the taste test. So if you have never tried doing microgreens or growing sprouts on your own, I highly recommend you give it a try. I'm going to show you a couple easy ones that I'm going to start today. And show you how you don't really need to buy a lot of equipment, other than a grow light. And when you start looking around and looking at some of the containers that you get food in, like these are two takeout dishes that we got some wings in. There's a lot of things that you can reuse to grow your own sprouts. So I picked these because they, of course, have a nice deep tray, a little bit of a dome, so that you got some kind of a nice growing greenhouse effect on it. And what I've done is I've just cut these lids off to get them ready. So today I am going to show you how to do one of my favorite sprouting blends. And this is called the Broccoli Brasaka Blend. You can do these in a sprouting jar, which I often do. But today I'm going to just try growing them in a tray here. And the other thing that we're going to grow today is some pea sprouts. And I love growing pea sprouts because they taste a lot like a fresh garden pea, which you can only get a few months of the year. So I think growing pea sprouts is a great way to enjoy the flavor of green peas. And the other great thing about this microgreen process that we're going to do today is there's no dirt involved. I am growing my sprouts in cheesecloth. So this is the medium that I am going to be using today. A lot of times you see people use potting soil or coconut core. I've made a video in the past about growing pea sprouts just in sprouting trays, which works well. But today I'm going to show you how to use cheesecloth. So I've taken the cheesecloth here and cut a fairly long strip that I'm just going to fold up. So it's about three layers thick and just spreading it into the bottom. And cheesecloth is so inexpensive. You can pick up these packages at the dollar store. This one was about 25. And you can even reuse these multiple times to grow your sprouts, especially with something like the peas that has a bigger sprout. They're very easy to clean out and you can reuse these over and over again. So I'm just going to saturate these with water in the tap and just drain off the excess. The peas that I'm using are also from mom's sprouting seeds. These are a seeded company that you can buy online directly from their website and also from Amazon. So I will put a link in the description box below where you can find these sprouting seeds. So I had soaked my peas in water since yesterday just to kind of get them going a little faster. You don't necessarily have to pre-soak them. So I'm just going to spread them out so there's none on top of each other. So this blend that I'm doing here today has broccoli, broccoli, raddish, oriental mustard and arugula. So it's a nice variety of sprouts. They're they're all quite tiny. They're great to, you know, put in a salad or to eat in a sandwich. Kind of replacing lettuce. So they're fairly fine. So this cheesecloth works really good for this because they won't, you know, fall through the cracks. And I'm just going to use this spoon to lightly sprinkle them. So my peas are fairly saturated because they've been soaking in water. But I'm going to give this a little extra spritz. So I always like to keep a sprouting spritz bottle handy that I only put clean tap water or distilled water in here because you're going to be eating these sprouts and because we're spritzing them directly. I want to make sure you're using good water. Now, I like to keep my sprouts in the dark until they germinate. And that is especially important with the peas. You want to make sure you keep them in total blackout darkness until they've sprouted and started to grow. Otherwise, if they soon as they see the light, they kind of get to grow too fast and get laggy. So what I like to do is cover them up and I've taken my lid and just inverted it. And I'm going to put some weight on here so that when these peas start to sprout, they won't grow too fast. And you kind of keep a weight on them for, you know, the first three to four days will monitor them. And then when they start to really get fully germinated and growing, then you can we will be removing the lid and putting them under the lights. As far as these, you can sprout them in light. I'm going to just put them in darkness just because I'm going to be keeping these together for a couple of days till they start sprouting. And then I will just invert the lid here, put them under the grow lights and eventually once they get going good, we just take the lid off and let them grow. So for those first few days, when I'm waiting for these to germinate and get sprouting, I like to keep them on my counter close that so I won't forget. You've got to check on them once or twice a day. Keep them moist with your spray bottle. I'm going to put a weight here on the peas just to try to keep them from growing up too fast. If you can find a dark towel or even a box or something to cover it, you want to keep it in total darkness. So I'm going to cover it up here. And that is pretty much it for day one. We will check back in the next couple of days and see how things are going. So here is what our sprouts are looking like after two days. You can see the peas are really sprouting. They're still very white, the roots, which is good. We don't want to get them too leggy, so we're going to keep them in the dark. And here are our other sprouts. Zoom in on them. They look like they have mold on them, but that is actually just some of the seeds that are germinating. There's a little bit of kind of hair, tiny hairs on them when they germinate, so that's OK. I'm just going to keep these moist with a little spritz. I'm going to keep the peas in the dark. These I am going to just put this dome on them for now for a couple of days and let them get some light so they can start growing. So around day six or seven, once these seedlings have started to really take off and the pea sprouts here are getting pretty strong, I move them underneath grow lights. So you can see here, I just have a small little grow light. I will leave a link to these and a couple of different cheap grow lights that you can buy in the description below. So this time I will keep them under the dome and just keep them spritzed. Keep an eye on them each day. Here we are at about day nine. And as you can see, the pea sprouts are really growing nicely and developing a lot of little leaves on them. They've got very big roots and my microgreen blend here is about an inch, an inch and a half high now. And I usually just spritz underneath now so that those roots get the water right away. So I'll just keep them under the grow lights for another day or two. So my pea sprouts and the microgreens have been growing now for about 11 days. And I'm thinking that I'm ready to harvest them. You can't leave them longer, but I think it's time for a taste test. OK, so we are now at day 11 and I think these are ready to harvest. Let's give you a good close up of what these sprouts look like. So they are about two inches tall. And the great thing about the cheesecloth here is that you're not going to lose much. You don't have to even cut these. And you can literally just pull them right out of the cheesecloth. And the roots, of course, are OK to eat as well. So you're getting, you know, pretty very little waste when you use this type of medium to grow your sprouts in, which is what I really love about it. So I do like to give them a rinse, even though, you know, they're probably not too dirty. But I'm going to just remove them from the cheesecloth. So tonight we're having barbecued burgers. I think some of these sprouts on a cheeseburger would be really good. I like to use them in an egg salad or tuna salad. These for this particular blend has a nice spicy flavor. I'm hoping to make a zucchini soup with some garden zucchini. And I think, again, these spicy sprouts will be really good in the soup as well. So the pea sprouts, of course, you got to, you know, the pea here still. So it's not like you can just rip these out and eat them. You do have to remove them. So I like to just snack on these. And as you see, it's got a really big root. You can choose to eat that as well or not, but they are easy just to snap right off the pea. And just pop it in your mouth. So I'm just going to pull away the peas before I put them in here and give them a rinse. As you can see here, once you get to get pulling these peashells out of here, it's pretty easy to clean out and reuse the cheesecloth. Now, it's totally optional. I usually just end up throwing my cheesecloth into the compost and using a new piece because, you know, it's relatively cheap to buy this from the dollar store. So it's up to you, but just so you can see that this could be rinsed and reused multiple times. So after you rinse these, you want to make sure you try to get as much moisture out of these as possible so that they stay fresher and longer in your fridge. I'm using my reusable cotton towels here, which I love to use for, you know, storing my lettuces and my greens. And I've just got two layers here right now. Just going to try to absorb as much of the moisture as we can. And then I just roll them up like this. Now you may have to use a couple towels because there was a lot of moisture in here. I tried putting, you know, these kind of sprouts into a salad spinner, but you usually end up with a big mess because these are so tiny and there's little tiny seeds. And so I find just using these cloth towels to absorb the moisture works the best. And here are my pea sprouts, which I gave a little rinse to. So I'm going to roll them up as well. So that's an easy way to keep your sprouts fresh in the fridge for up to seven days. And I think it's time now to have a taste test with my grandson. Okay, so I think the first thing that you would probably might like is the pea sprouts because he loved garden peas from my garden this year. And I find that these sprouts taste just like fresh garden peas. You give those a try? I'll try some too. You like them? They kind of taste like the peas, hey? A bit of a different texture when you're a little guy, but they taste pretty good, don't they? So these here are a little bit spicy, but I will give you a little bit of these. I'll try a little bit. They're a little better when you mix them with something, but see what you think. Are they hot? You can help yourself tomorrow. These are so good for you. So I hope you enjoyed watching how you can grow your own microgreens and pea sprouts without using any soil. And please leave a comment below, hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to my channel. Thank you for watching.