While putting together the MicrogreenFarm business I can't tell you how many hours I spent poring over web sites, hardware & garden stores, hydroponic stores and food distributors. The journey led to endless experiments and trials to find the best mix of components to grow the finest microgreens. Our last blog highlighted the behavior of the plants as they went through their growth phases and harvested our wonderful crops. In order to produce the finest microgreens we had to find a mix of what to grow in and the combination of nutrients to ensure the best colors, nutrient content, and taste in our crops. We have found that the addition of worm sea solids to our base media was the best after extensive trial and error. So we had seeds, growing media, nutrients to create our kits. Further thought and work went into addressing the spacing and application of our seeds. Feedback from our great customers and many fails and successes has led us to our new product. It became obvious that this new product was an incredibly versatile tool to enable you to grow microgreens, baby greens or even seed your containers or gardens for the spring. Pictured here is a test of our product using an herb "shaker" to make the application of our seed simple and even. The seeds are mixed in dry media and applied over any container. The container pictured has our hydroponic kit mat spread on the bottom. We simply applied an even layer of mix on top of the mat. No more mixing of nutrients or needing specialized growing materials. This seeding product will allow you to control seed density and application simply and effectively. Our last blog in this series will unveil our new product for sale ....
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From Day 1 of our microgreen journey, I recognized that one of the keys to great crops was how you placed the seeds. The placement of the seeds and time to grow dictated the crop that you would get. Microgreens go from seed to harvest in a very short time frame, generally 1-3 weeks before they would start to grow out to become baby greens. Also note that we took some harvested microgreen trays and placed them in a container garden and grew out fine crops of baby greens. The spacing for the baby greens was far larger as the crop naturally thinned out from a fully harvested tray. Finally, taking some plants that grew out further and planting them by themselves led to fully developed plants (see photos below of all three stages). All of this taken from the same seeds that we used to plant our microgreens. This has led to our first new product that we call the Microgreen Seeder (we may be renaming this before final release). We will provide more details tomorrow in the next installment of our blog ... Microgreens were highlighted yesterday on the popular TV show, Dr Oz. Discussed were the benefits of adding microgreens to our diets and the nutritional punch available from these wonderful vegetables. Upon further digging on Dr Oz's website I uncovered a co-authored article outlining more specific benefits. The article said, "One study found most of these sprouted seeds, vegetables and grains have four to six times the nutritional content of their full-grown versions. Of the 25 varieties tested, red cabbage had the highest concentration of vitamin C ... and daikon radish was tops in vitamin E." Red cabbage on the way and daikon already offered in our kits. Watch for our next blog outlining an exciting new product that will be the first of our newly branded products. Microgreenfarm is evolving. Our new logo will hopefully give you a brief glimpse of what is coming soon. There are several new products and kits that are coming in the next few weeks and the new artwork embodies our direction. We have several exciting products and mixes that have been under development. Our first new branded product will be introduced on a blog this week. It will be in some stores and available online also. Watch for the announcement. Extremely provocative title for an interesting article by Gabriella Boson and just published in the New Zealand Herald ... "What will be the superfoods of 2015?". This great article highlights many of the microgreen crops we started unveiling back in November of last year.
Cauliflower, broccoli, amaranth and brussels sp routs are all named prominently in the article. It has always been our contention that the nutrients of the full plant are embodied within the tiny microgreens. Studies have shown that nutrients are so much more concentrated in microgreens and our kits not only promote these nutrients but add essential trace minerals through our sea solids. We call our new microgreen kits, Wellness Kits, and now we should change them to Superfood Wellness Kits !!! Today we are introducing two new Microgreen Wellness Kits, purple broccoli and brussels sprouts. In keeping with introducing products that have significant nutrient properties we are proud to show both of these new kits. Both crops are pictured after two weeks of growth, longer than our normal 7-10 day cycles but nicely grown and a great addition to your live food choices.
Brussels sprouts are now known to top the list of commonly eaten cruciferous vegetables. Their total glucosinolate content has been shown to be greater than the amount found in mustard greens, turnip greens, cabbage, kale, cauliflower, or broccoli. Glucosinolates are important phytonutrients for our health because they are the chemical starting points for a variety of cancer-protective substances. All cruciferous vegetables contain glucosinolates and have great health benefits for this reason. In the same vein, it has been found that purple broccoli contains higher contents of antioxidant compounds compared with green broccoli, but tended to show higher sensitivity to cooking treatments. Thus our new microgreen kits are the ideal method to introduce nutrient packed live food to your diet. Our partners in India, Terra Farms Mumbai has taken the city by storm and has been featured in Vogue India with an article describing their unique product. It has been our pleasure to work with Linesh from Terra Farms and fascinating to watch the growth and evolution of their offerings in this unique marketplace. Microgreens delivered as live and fresh is the answer to top nutrition delivery and taste ... join the Urbafresh live food revolution now and contact us for more information ... One of our longtime growers just showed me her container garden outside that she has done the mat regrow. She has even gotten a large radish (estimated 8"-10") growing in the container. You can see in the photo at the left that the remnant seeds and plants not harvested are more than enough to create a full regrowth of your harvested microgreens. The picture below shows pea plants that sprouted from wonderful pea microgreens and are now happy full plants that are bearing pods full of sweet and juicy peas to eat again. The crops that our kits contain all make wonderful regrow sites when simply put into your container garden or garden. Use our microgreen kits to yield wonderful and nutritious microgreen crops, once harvested, you can simply move the mat into your garden and create a wealth of baby greens and with patience full new plants. We have harvested a full kale plants and swiss chard that is now in our garden tower. We provide ample seed in each kit to seed your kit and allow for this type of regrowth of the wonderful plants that the microgreens grow into. Get a heastart on spring and start growing your microgreens now !!! Here is a quick tip for getting a headstart on your spring gardening. Since we are located in Hawaii, we have a year round growing season but what we do with harvested trays can be easily replicated no matter where you are once your outside temperatures allow for spring planting. My neighbor here who is using our kits has had similar planting success and ensuring we don't waste our precious seeds and plants. There will always be many seeds that don't have room to grow and they will flourish in the new planting. She has been especially successful with wheatgrass also. Both our hydroponic mats and wondersoil are ideal for this activity. We have placed them both in container gardens and directly into the garden. Simply dig out an approximate size in your garden surface, place the entire mat or tray of wondersoil, and level out the surface. You can then grow more microgreens, grow them out longer to make baby greens, or let them grow out to full sized plants. Last year we let a couple of Kale plants grow out and they provided wonderful leaves for our stir fry's and omelettes. |
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February 2020
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