Hey everyone, we’re back here with Tabletop Farmer for another Facebook Live talking about the microgreen business and growing microgreens. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about do microgreens have a special nutritional value? And the answer to that is yes, but there is a very important factor in that nutritional value and that’s something that I’ve done a lot of research over the weekend looking at all the different ways that people out there are growing microgreens and it’s very, very interesting.
And last week I made a phone call to some people that I work with in the soil health academy. They were on a soil health summit that I held earlier this year and we talked in great length about the nutritional value and how the plants get that in the beginning stages. And there are some important or some very, very interesting studies that have been done in the first days of growing plants.
And there’s a bacteria fungi ratio that helps to control the plant growth and it also helps feed that nutritional value to that plant within that first seven to 21 days. So, that being said, yes they have a very, very special nutritional value, but we’re going to be teaching and showing you what is the best way to get that and how to get the most out of it.
And that’s going to be coming up later on down here that we’re going to be teaching more about that. So it has some very exciting things coming for you about the microgreens, either growing them for your own use for health. If you don’t have a big yard with garden space and whatnot, that you can grow a garden and maybe you’re in a spot where you want to be able to utilize some type of nutritional plant in smoothies or salads, or just a munch on throughout the whole year, you’re able to do that with this microgreen system.
So with that I’m out here again on the Memorial Day Garden we have, I’m going to give you a little shot of this right here. As you can see, our weed barrier is doing awesome. It’s doing an unbelievable job for us. Our tomatoes are looking good. We got potatoes that came from seed. They’re up the lettuces doing good. The beans, the zucchini, the peas. We got sweet potatoes way back over there in the corner that came back. Dill, cucumbers, but we do have an issue, it’s called a rodent issue and it’s a kind of a ground squirrel thing.
And so this is going around the outside edge and you can see we’ve started putting in some posts to do that. So that is part of what I will be finishing this afternoon and working on to help to keep ground squirrels from chewing things off in the garden before we can chew them off.
That being sad, we’ve already covered what are microgreens and what are the best plant types for microgreens in that study. A lot of things being done with sunflowers, peas and radishes. Those seem to be the most popular ones at farmer’s markets, so you want to keep that in mind.
The sunflowers, the peas and the radishes. Radishes are used a lot for salads and whatnot. They’re very colorful but there’s some issues with growing the sunflowers, the peas not so much and the radishes not so much, but the sunflowers have, they have some issues with some fungus and things in them that we’ve been learning about so we’re going to be doing some testing for you as well.
We’re going to be testing on this nutritional value thing. Last week in the conversation I had with my soil health partners, and I don’t want to get this video too long, but with my soil health partners we talked about different ways.
We are going to be doing testing in two ways. We are going to be testing soil and we’re going to be testing tissue in the soil we’re growing and it’s going to be A against B and we’re going to be going all through that for you, showing you how to do all this so we have some real exciting things in store for you.
Leave your comments below. If you have questions about growing microgreens, maybe you’ve been thinking about it or you’re doing it already, some of your experiences, please comment below, give us a thumbs up. Give us a like on this video, if you like it, if you don’t like it, give us a thumbs down but hopefully it’s all likes.
So with that, Steve Szudera, founder of Tabletop Farmer signing off. Thanks for watching this. We’ll talk to you again soon.
