Gardeners' Holidays 2021: Indoor Growing Day

Here in New Jersey, we're just settling in for a big winter storm that's expected to dump anywhere from 13 to 23 inches of snow on top of us between now and Tuesday morning. Yet at the very same time, we're preparing for our first harvest from our 2021 garden. Our indoor 2021 garden.

You see, one of our Hanukkah gifts this year was a gift certificate to High Mowing Seeds, a purveyor of organic herb, flower, and vegetable seeds. However, we knew we didn't want to buy all the seeds for our 2021 garden there, because they didn't carry some of the trusted varieties we normally buy from Fedco. So we checked out the website to see what they had to offer, and we noticed a section dedicated to microgreens — those little baby greens that were so popular in trendy restaurants before COVID shut them all down.

As it happened, I'd just read an article in the New York Times about growing microgreens indoors, and I'd already been musing on the possibility of starting some, perhaps with our remaining arugula seeds. Our garden was one of the few spots of normalcy in our lives that helped get us through the long, isolated pandemic summer, and I thought perhaps bringing a bit of the garden indoors could help get us through an even longer and more isolated pandemic winter. So our gift certificate proved to be just the nudge we needed to get this project started.

We spent our store credit on two varieties of seeds: broccoli, which I'd enjoyed before in sprout form, and basil, which the Times article recommended as a way to "punch up the summery quotient" in winter recipes. The article recommended growing them in "standard nursery flats with drainage holes, called 1020 flats, with trays that fit beneath," and as it happened, we already had three of those that we'd received as a gift one previous Christmas. We hadn't used them for starting seeds, preferring to stick with the seed starting setup we'd already fine-tuned over several years of gardening, so they were just stashed away with the other gardening supplies, ready and waiting to be pressed into service. We decided to start by planting one tray with each variety of greens, and depending on the results, we could opt to plant a second tray of one type or the other. The trays came with their own clear plastic covers, and we already had a spray bottle for misting the seedlings and a lighted tray to set them on. The only other thing we needed was a bag of potting soil, which we picked up at the nearest Home Depot, and we were ready to grow.

So, according to the instructions in the article, Brian moistened the soil and mixed it together with his hands until it could hold its shape when squeezed.

Then he loaded it into the trays and tamped it down, and I gently scattered the seeds on top. I just took a generous pinch between two fingers and sprinkled it across each of the little squares built into the tray, counting the seeds as i went. The article said to aim for 10 to 12 seeds per square inch for "small seeds like basil, mizuna or kale" and 6 to 8 per inch for "larger ones like beets or chard." Since the little squares built into the trays were closer to an inch and a half on a side, I went for about 20 of the little basil seeds and 15 of the larger broccoli seeds.

Then we covered them up with their plastic lids and waited for the seeds to sprout, which took about two days for the broccoli and four for the basil. Once the seeds in each tray were showing their first bits of green, we took the domes off and set them under the lights for the recommended 16 hours a day, misting them regularly but lightly with water from the spray bottle.

After about one week, both trays now display a dense carpet of tiny green sprouts. According to the Times article, they're still not ready to harvest, as neither one has its first "true leaves" yet. So far, they're just large sprouts, not small greens. But I have snitched a couple of the broccoli sprouts from some of the more densely packed squares, and they were both tender and tasty. 

I'm guessing they'll be officially ready to eat sometime this week, so now all we have to do is figure out how we want to use them. So far, my ideas include:

• Additions to a salad (but it's a bit chilly for salads at the moment)
• Toppings for falafel (or any kind of sandwich, really)
• Toppings for pizza
  
• Tossed with pasta
• Broccoli greens added to a soup, such as Mark Bittman's "vastly improved store-bought ramen" (discard the flavor packet and add soy sauce, sesame oil, scallions, and an egg)
• Broccoli greens in a stir-fry 
• Added to scrambled eggs (one of the suggestions from a grower in the Times article)
  

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure a quick search could lead me to lots of recipes specifically featuring these varieties of microgreens, and I'm sure you'll be seeing some of those in future Recipe of the Month posts. But for now, I feel like we have plenty to get started with.

It remains to be seen whether any of these microgreen-spiked dishes become regular additions to our winter recipe repertoire. But even if they're never anything more than a novelty, they've already served the purpose of livening up this long, cold, lonely winter. As far as I'm concerned, that alone has made them a worthwhile investment.