HomeTown Seeds: 3-Tray Kitchen Seed Sprouter Review and Giveaway
14.2 years ago seeds, sprouting
Last year I played with sprouting seeds in a mason jar to hold me and the kids over during the winter until it was time to start growing for the following spring. The process worked great but I ended up with way more sprouts than I could consume and most of the sprouts were wasted. One option was to use smaller jars and stagger the starting of the seeds, but this would leave me to fill and drain 3-4 jars a couple of days.
Fortunately Hometown Seeds has a product (3-Tray Kitchen Sprouter) that solves these problems for me and when they asked it I would want to review this product I jumped at the chance.
The kit comes with 3 trays and a packet of 2 oz of organic alfalfa seeds, which you can fill each with a half of tablespoon of seeds to get a full tray full of sprouts in 2-3 days. Each tray is easily removable so you can choose to create 3 trays worth of sprouts at a time or create start a new tray every day to always have a fresh supply of sprouts.
After you have added the seeds you put the pieces together and simply fill the top reservoir with water and the sprouter does the rest. The sprouter uses a syphon technique to allow the tray to partially fill with water before draining to the tray below it, to repeat the process for any other trays you have.
Here you can see the syphoning in action.
I have not tried it myself but I don’t see any reason if you bought multiple kits and stack them as high as you want and have a sprouting factory on your kitchen counter.
Overall I was very impressed with the sprouter it was easy to use and entertaining for my 6-year-old to watch the water drain through the various levels. Also produced clean quality sprouts without making a mess all over the kitchen counter. The only negative observation is sometimes the seeds/sprouts can clog the syphon if too many get packed together. Fortunately when this happened to me, I simply removed the plastic syphon cap and pushed away a few of the seed/sprouts blocking the drain and didn’t have any problems after that, but something to keep an eye on.
Here are some sprouts I after growing for 2 days…tomorrow they will go on some sandwiches.
Hometown Seeds has also graciously offered one of these sprouting systems to readers of CVG, so if you are in the continental United States, just enter a comment below and I will pick a winner at random in one week (9/18/2010 Midnight PST)
Tags: seed
Organizing seeds using bead containers
14.3 years ago cheap, seed saving, seed storing
I first saw this idea on a garden mailing list at work but given most of you are not on that, I figured I should share with the rest of you. My problem was I had a big bag of seeds and it was always a pain to dif through and find the right seeds for the time of year I was planting.
My solution was to use Darice Bead Container
One printed I added the seeds and labels and grouped by planting time. After I was done I did have some thoughts about getting even more organized with a little color coding of specific dates…but guess I should take small steps
As you can see from a glance you can find your seeds and do a quick inventory of your available seeds. With this you can make easy incites like, “I really shouldn’t plant on collecting onion seeds this year” or “I almost forgot to plant fall spinach/lettuce”
Well off knock off a onion flower and plant some spinach and lettuce for this fall/winter.
Tags: seed
