• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
The Artisan Life
  • Dot Marker Pages
  • Valentine’s Printables
  • Journals & Planners
  • Preschool + K Printables
    • Alphabet Tracing Worksheets
    • Fine Motor Practice Pages
    • Spanish Preschool Pages
    • CVC & Sight Words
    • Dot Marker Pages
    • Preschool Math
    • Kindergarten Math Worksheets
    • Cut & Paste Puzzles
  • Coloring
  • Gardening + DIY
    • Gardening
    • DIY Cleaning Products
    • DIY Skincare Products
    • Craft Tutorials
  • Shop

DIY Microgreens – How to Plant and Grow your own Microgreens (Updated for 2020!)

30 shares
  • Share

Growing your own microgreens is an easy and affordable way to have fresh greens all year long, even if you live in an apartment! Learn how to plant and grow your own microgreens with this handy guide.

Microgreens are popular at trendy restaurants and farmer’s markets. They can be expensive to purchase, but they’re cheap and easy to grow. Learn how to grow your own microgreens at home to add fresh, nutritious veggies to your diet any time of year!

Top down photo of three containers of microgreens growing

This post includes affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission on purchases made through links at no additional cost to you.

Microgreens are tasty and nutritious. Microgreens are also great because you can grow them pretty much year round and they don’t take up much space. Doesn’t fresh produce in your apartment during winter sound awesome?

In addition to planting a Petomato and starting up an AeroGarden, we’ve also recently begun growing microgreens.

Table of Contents

  • Are microgreens the same thing as sprouts?
  • Benefits of microgreens
  • Supplies for growing microgreens
  • The best microgreens to eat
  • How to plant microgreens

Are microgreens the same thing as sprouts?

No, microgreens are different from sprouts.

Traditional sprouts are not grown in dirt (people grow them in jars or special sprouting trays and wash them daily) and are typically consumed, roots and all, once their first set of “seed leaves” appear.

Since they are grown in a warm, moist environment, sprouts are at risk for bacterial contamination. Although the risk is small, there have been dozens of recorded cases of food born illnesses from eating raw or lightly cooked sprouts.

Microgreens are planted in soil and usually aren’t harvested until their second set of leaves, which are also their first “true leaves” grow.

Microgreens can also be harvested later, after they have several sets of true leaves. Many of the microgreens I’ve personally seen at the farmer’s market are harvested when the shoots have 4-6″ of total length and several sets of leaves.

Microgreens do not cary the same risk for food born illness, which means they are safer to eat. This is especially true for people with weaker immune systems like children, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Benefits of microgreens

Microgreens are incredibly nutritious. In fact, a study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry shows that microgreens have a greater concentration of beneficial compounds like vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta-carotene than full grown plants!

According to these researchers, microgreens can contain up to 40 times more nutrients than mature plants.

Although microgreens are expensive to purchase, they are cheap and easy to grow at home. This can help you eat more vegetables on a budget!

How to Plant and Grow Microgreens

Supplies for growing microgreens

Update: In a hurry? Simply grab a microgreens growing kit! These awesome kits weren’t around when I first wrote this post, so I had to come back and include one!

Sale
Window Garden Microgreens Grow Kit - Includes Microgreen Seeds, Fiber Soil,...
Window Garden Microgreens Grow Kit - Includes Microgreen Seeds, Fiber Soil,...
  • Complete Started Set – Includes radish microgreen seeds, sprouting tray, fiber soil, and a 150 ml sprayer. good for your indoor garden.
  • Stylish and Nutritious – These healthy microgreens look good on a dish as a gourmet garnish or as a window display while growing.
  • Multi-Use Planting Tray – Comes with a 15" x 6" BPA-free acrylic planter tray. Can also be used for succulents, table centrepiece, etc
Check current price

Containers – We simply kept the plastic clamshell containers from lettuce and strawberries. We had enough pretty quickly because my husband loves strawberries and the guinea pig munches through a lot of baby kale and spring mix!

You can buy seedling flats or other containers, but we didn’t see the need since we could get what we needed for free by waiting a week or two.

We set the containers down inside large reusable plastic food containers (those lasagna-pan sized Tupperware-type things) to make sure water and dirt don’t leak out and stain our furniture.

Potting soil – I know it costs a few dollars more, but look for potting soil, not generic “dirt” for filling in holes. If it’s important to you, search out organic options.

Microgreen seeds – An amazing variety of plants can be grown and eaten as microgreens, but some are easier to get started with than others. Quick-sprouting seeds give you a great sense of payoff!

When looking for seeds, make sure to purchase seeds intended for sprouting or microgreen use. Don’t rush to the hardware store and buy 10 packets of broccoli and radish. You should avoid these “garden variety” (hehe) seeds for a couple reasons. First, this gets really expensive because growing microgreens requires a lot of seed compared to how much is in those packages!

Furthermore, most seeds designed for planting in your garden have anti-bacterial and/or anti-fungal agents. Because you may end up eating the seeds, or at least parts of them, when you grow microgreens, it’s best to avoid seeds that have been treated with chemical agents.

A spray bottle – This isn’t totally mandatory, but I like using a spray bottle to water our microgreens. You can usually find one at a drug store or somewhere like Target for about a dollar. Just don’t repurpose a bottle that used to contain a household cleaner!

Some sort of weight – We just use rectangular glass Pyrex dishes or the plastic container lids with books stacked on top.

This is optional, but helpful if you plant a whole lot of seeds.

Things you do not need include:

Grow lights – If you’re just looking to grow a couple trays at a time, even weak window sunlight or an under-counter fluorescent/LED will work fine. Don’t go drop lots of money on grow lights just to see if you enjoy microgreens!

Gardening experience – If you’re using easy-sprouting seeds, you only have to keep things alive for about a week. Put past gardening failures behind you – you can do this!

Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening: How to Grow Nutrient-Dense,...
Microgreens: How to Grow Microgreens for Fun or Profit
Microgreen Garden: Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Greens
-
-
Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening: How to Grow Nutrient-Dense,...
Microgreens: How to Grow Microgreens for Fun or Profit
-
-
Microgreen Garden: Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Greens

The best microgreens to eat

Virtually any seeds can be used as a microgreen, as long as the entire plant is edible. Some plants have inedible parts that contain toxins, to make sure to check if you’re not sure!

Some of the most popular seeds to use for microgreens include:

  • Alfalfa
  • Arugula
  • Basil
  • Beet
  • Broccoli
  • Buckwheat
  • Chia
  • Green peas
  • Radish
  • Spinach
  • Watercress
  • Mustard
  • Sunflower

Many microgreens taste like their full-grown counterparts. For example, pea shoots taste exact like green peas!

Spicier vegetables like radish, mustard, and arugula taste spicy. Herbs like basil taste – you guessed it – like basil.

Because of their mild flavor, peas and alfalfa make good “beginner” microgreens for people just getting started.

fresh microgreens on a spoon

How to plant microgreens

1. If needed, poke a few holes in your plastic container bottoms. Some containers (like ones for berries) already have holes, but other containers (like those for lettuce) do not. Just use a drill, pair of scissors, or even a hammer and nail to make at least half a dozen holes for drainage.

2. Mostly fill your container with potting soil and pat it down. You don’t need to really compress the soil, but make sure it is somewhat firm.

fill container with soil for microgreensfill container with soil for microgreens

3. Sprinkle a small handful of seeds across your prepared soil. The first couple of times, I really over-planted my seeds. They don’t need lots of space, but there shouldn’t be so many seeds you can’t see the soil, either! You’ll just need to experiment with your container to see what words for you.

get a small handfull of seeds

4. Lightly spray the seeds with your water bottle. You want the soil to be damp, but not sodden.

sprinkle seeds

5. Cover the seeds with your weight.

add light weight

6. Set your microgreen container in a windowsill, on a table near a window, under a fluorescent kitchen light, etc. We have ours in a North-facing window and our seeds seem to get ample light.

6. If you’re using fast-sprouting seeds like alfalfa and radish, you’ll start to see sprouts in under 24 hours. After 2 or 3 days, remove the weights. Remove them sooner if you start noticing lots of mildew/mold. Amazingly, our sprouts usually lift the Pyrex containers in 48-72 hours!

7. Allow your greens to grow, rotating as necessary if they lean excessively towards light. Harvest when you’re ready to eat them! Microgreens are “traditionally” harvested right after the second set of leaves appears, but you can harvest them when they only have their seed leaves. It’s up to you!

mixed microgreens

8. To harvest, simply cut the greens off at ground level using a pair of scissors. Wash and enjoy!

We usually end up cutting off/pulling out the radish greens long before we harvest the others. Radish grows really fast and towers over the other greens!

radish microgreens

The first time we planted microgreens, we put them under a thin layer of soil. There were so many greens and they grew so fast that they lifted the dirt up as they went! Not adding soil and using a light weight really cut down on the amount of dirt we had to pull out of our greens before eating them.

Many people recommend soaking most seeds for a day before planting them in order to hasten germination. Since our mix sprouts in less than a full day, I haven’t found that necessary.

If you purchase slower-sprouting seeds that specifically recommend soaking, you may want to add that extra step before planting. If you want to get into sprouting the more “difficult” seeds, picking up a microgreen book might be helpful.

Some seeds, like parsley and cilantro, can take up to three weeks to sprout and can be difficult to work with.

Books like Microgreen Garden and the others shown below show you how to deal with problems like mold and bacteria that are exacerbated by growing more difficult seeds and detail a variety of different seeds and what their microgreens taste like.

We purchase our microgreen seeds on Amazon, but there are other sprout/microgreen seed retails on the web that allow you greater flexibility and seed choice. Because we live in Hawaii, shipping for pounds of seed is prohibitive unless we can make our purchases on Amazon Prime.

Spicy Micro Salad Mix Microgreens Seeds: 1 Lb - Non-GMO Seed Blend:...
Spicy Micro Salad Mix Microgreens Seeds: 1 Lb - Non-GMO Seed Blend:...
  • Vegetable Garden & Microgreens Sprouting Seeds: Mix - Spicy Salad - 1 Lb.
  • High Germination Rate - Non-GMO - Chemical Free.
  • Perfect for Growing Microgreens & Garden Seeds. Due to the mucilaginous nature of the arugula seeds, we do not recommend these for home jar sprouting.
Check current price

No matter what seeds you decide to use, I hope you enjoy growing microgreens as much as we do!

Don’t lose track of this DIY microgreens guide – Pin it now!

Text "diy microgreens - how to grow fresh veggies, even if you live in an apartment" with a picture of microgreens

If you’re interested in creating a healthier home, you may also enjoy these posts:

Easy Swaps for a Healthy Home

Discover easy, budget friendly changes you can make for a healthier home!

The Best Aluminum Foil Alternatives for a Healthier, Zero Waste Lifestyle

Learn what to use instead of aluminum foil for baking, grilling, and food straoge in this comprehensive guide.

Plastic Wrap Alternatives

Save money and the environment when you chose a plastic wrap alternative!

Homemade Carpet Powder - Easy, Non-Toxic DIY Carpet Powder Recipe

Text "diy microgreens - how to grow nutritious greens anywhere" with a top down photo of three microgreen containers
30 shares
  • Share

Buy me a coffee

Filed Under: healthy home

Previous Post: « Free Valentine’s Day I Spy Printable (Free printable Valentine’s I Spy for Kids)
Next Post: Winter I Spy Printable »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Sandy

    December 17, 2016 at 18:58

    Hi it sounds fascinating growing micro greens. Once grown can they be given to Guinea pigs if so which are the best and which to avoid. Thanks. I am in the UK. But it shouldn’t be a problem to get the seeds as you said Amazon sold them. Sandy.

    Reply
    • Natashalh

      December 17, 2016 at 20:54

      Back before our piggy passed, I used to give her micro greens as a treat. Micro greens are more nutrient dense than the full grown plants and it’s important for guinea pigs to not get too much calcium, so mainly I’d make sure to not feed too much (just as a treat, not as main veg source). Many common micro greens, such as radish, are cavy safe. This site has a good list of foods that are unsafe for piggies that may help you out =) https://www.happycavy.com/guinea-pig-dangerous-unsafe-foods/
      Hope that helps!

      Reply
« Older Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

natashalh - the artisan life

Hi, I’m Natasha! I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m a former classroom teacher with a Masters of the Arts in Teaching turned homeschooler & gardener. I share educational & planner printables and tips for making gardening with kids successful and affordable.

I also publish printed coloring & activity books. You can also find me on YouTube.

Let's be friends!

Search The Artisan Life

The Artisan Life is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

The Artisan Life also uses affiliate links for other sites. For a full look at my policy, please visit its page here.

Buy me a coffee

Footer

Privacy Policy | Disclosure & Disclaimer | Terms and Conditions | Contact
COPYRIGHT © 2012 – 2023 The Artisan Life · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
If you have any questions feel free to contact me directly here: natashalh(at)stalkingthewildsnark(dot)com. I do not accept guest posts and will not respond to unsolicited requests for guest posts or links. Stock images by Depositphotos

Copyright © 2023 The Artisan Life on the Foodie Pro Theme