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Attempting to Improve my Alfalfa Sprout Yield

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 much neater pile at the bottom of the jar. I worried that the seeds would dry out just being stuck to the side of the jar. But perhaps this was causing more issues such as less air for the seeds or the seeds sitting in more water than they should. I still just couldn't help myself from putting the seeds in a neat pile for the first day but was determined to not do this once the seeds began to sprout. For comparison check out these two pictures:

First alfalfa sprout batch - seeds nice and neat on the bottom of the jar.
First alfalfa sprout batch - seeds nice and neat on the bottom of the jar.

Second alfalfa sprout batch - I left the sprouting seeds sticking on the side of the jar
Second alfalfa sprout batch - I left the sprouting seeds sticking on the side of the jar and put it on it's side to let them adhere more easily and possibly better air flow. 

Looking at both you can get a better idea of what I did differently. For my second batch I let the sprouts grow by setting the jar on the side while for my first batch it was grown completely with the jar in the upright position. I figured placing the jar on its side could possibly help two ways. One being the water would have more surface area to collect on (the "bottom" of the jar was now larger) and the second being that air flow might be better as air on it's own rarely flows up and down. 

I let both batches grow for the same amount of time. About a third of a day soaking and 4 days of growth and then a quarter of the day in my grow light to beef up the sprouts' chlorophyll. In the end it appeared that the second batch yield more sprouts. Of course just doing two different batches of alfalfa sprouts is not enough to declare that one way is better than the other yet. The seeds themselves could have just been more viable or maybe the indoor temperature was more ideal. Also, I didn't weight my yield from the first batch. I did weigh the second batch and after cleaning the sprouts and removing as much of the husks as possible, I ended up with about 120g of usable sprouts. I do have a third batch growing and will measure my yield at the end of that growth cycle. All in all, it's fun to be able to do these little experiments which inevitably still yield something that I can eat in the end!

Happy Growing.
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