Grow loads of food. Sand is easy to clean and reuse.
#gardening #growfood #Sustainability Alright, we got a cool little experiment going on and we're testing out growing microgreens in sand. Now, I want to try sand because we can reuse it rather quickly, unlike soil, which you can compost, but that'll take months for you to reuse it. Now, if you're one of the hundreds of people who have bought the adapters for our self watering microgreens, I'm also testing sand with that. So, I've got videos coming on that. It's going to be really helpful, but this is where I started. Another cool thing about the sand is I haven't had any problem with fungal gnats. So what we're going to do is plant these out, show you how easy that is. It's basically self watering. And after we cover them up, let them go about three or four days. After they germinate, remove the cover, set them out in the sun or under some grow lights. Now we're growing pea shoots and bean sprouts with no soil. And no nutrients either. Just grooming a tray like this, that was awesome. You can see we didn't have any algae. And it's really easy to clean up. Now for smaller seeds, we're trying something like the sand. And after you get them sprouted like this, if it's dried out on one side, but you feel the sand is still damp, you don't really have to refill it. Microgreens don't have a lot of crevices in them like collards and kale. So it comes off really easy. Now you're going to want to use this in a couple of days. All right now let's clean out the sand so that we can reuse it. All you do is pull it out of the container. It's really easy. And to me this looks pretty cool. Check out those roots. Look how nice and white they are. No mold, no algae, no funky stuff. Isn't that neat? Now to clean it up, I'm just going to do it in this bowl here. Rinse out the tray. You can take this inside and wash it if you like. A little soap and water. But you can see how clean it is. No problem, right? Alright, now just squish this all up. I usually harvest about 12 of these at a time, so I use a 5 gallon bucket. And I'll show you that in a little while. But I just wanted to show you this here. Notice there's no mold, mildew. No funky stuff going on here. Just nice and clean. Now this we can throw in our compost. Now you just wanna swoosh everything around really good. And all the light stuff's gonna float to the top. And all the sand's gonna sink to the bottom. You can't do that with soil. And I just dump off the top, right into the garden. It's not going to hurt anything. whatever little bits, sea hulls are left, just kind of scoop them out. Now you can do this two or three times and get everything out, but you can see it wasn't all that hard. I put all of mine in a big bucket and about a cap full of bleach and let it sit for a day. Then I just tilt it sideways like this, just like we did the bowl. Just about everything comes out. You can see after a couple of rinses, really clean. Then I just let it sit in the sun for a couple of days, ready to go again. So obviously we're not going to get all of the sand back. So sooner or later we will have to buy some more. But this is pretty good just reusing this much over and over and over again. So I just set everything back up and repeat the process. This is the same sand I used on the first round. Now on another round. This is tatsoi by the way. So I hope that helps. Like I said, we're trying this with the self alerting adapters. We're going to do some videos and set it up for you guys from start to finish so you understand how to do it. The clay pebbles still work, I still use those, but the sand is so easy to clean. Now the only drawback I can see so far, is it's kind of heavy. So you don't want real big containers. We'll get into that. Right now, you guys, live to inspire, keep on growing, be the change. We'll catch you next time.