The Capsule Garden

I had previously posted about my experience of learning to grow alfalfa sprouts at home in my previous blog post:  Growing Alfalfa Sprouts at Home - So simple!  Here I talked about the relatively simple and cheap process of growing delicious, fresh sprouts very easily at home. I did notice in my first batch there appeared to be several seeds that did sprout. There must be some percentage of seeds that are expected to not sprout but there appeared to be quite a lot. I began to consider things like was there too much standing water? Were the seeds compacted too closely together? This led me to think of things to try in my second batch of alfalfa sprouts. Firstly, I recalled from various videos that I had watched on YouTube about growing alfalfa sprouts that many of the people drained the water from the jar and left it as is. During my first batch I found myself taking a spoon and pushing down the seeds that stuck to the side of the jar after draining the water so they sat in a m...

Several weeks ago I was at my local Safeway in the produce section. During the pandemic/quarantine I have been eating a lot green salad. I think this is largely in part to how simple a salad is to make as well as the benefits of eating a lot vegetables. And plus when you buy the large bags of spinach and lettuce from Costco you have to do something with it before it goes bad. Anyway, I found myself in the sprout section. I was shocked to see how expensive a small container of alfalfa sprouts was. It must have been nearly $4 for an ounce or two. Crazy! When I got home later, I recalled that I had seen videos on YouTube about growing sprouts. I did a bit of research and decided to buy a bag of alfalfa sprouting seeds (make sure they are for sprouting and not for planting as there is the possibility of chemicals in the latter) on Amazon. It was a 12 ounce bag for $9.99. There are much larger bags of seeds at a better price but I was starting out so I didn't want to go too crazy. Aside...

It's been awhile since I've posted here. I haven't had much exciting stuff to post about plants through the Fall and Winter. But with Spring approaching, many of my plants are springing (pun intended) into growth. Sunlight like usual isn't great in my home but perhaps the plants notice the weather change. I hope to have some interesting content to post up soon! I've started dabbling with growing sprouts. It seemed like a crop that I could very easily grow and successfully harvest in my humble, mostly sunless apartment. So far I've successfully grown one batch of alfalfa sprouts. It took approximately five days to harvest my first crop. It was a rather cool experience watching the small amount of seeds in the jar explode into a huge bunch of sprouts. It was even more exciting as I got to enjoy them in a sandwich and a salad. I'm currently growing batch number two. If the alfalfa sprout growing continues going well, I might expand into broccoli sprouts. I'...