Why You Should Be Eating Microgreens Over Mature Plants

by RightFit Gardens | Last Updated: May 10, 2021

It is easy to consume more amounts of vitamins, antioxidants, and vital nutrients to your average diet by eating varieties of microgreens and leafy vegetables easily grown and accessible to everyone. Microgreens are the freshest leafy plants and they are more affordable to grow than ever. Adding edible microgreens or sprouts to your diet is a great way to support local, add flavor to your meals, increase vitamin intake, and they’re even suitable for ketogenic and low-carb diets. Here are some reasons why you might consider ordering microgreen seeds today or stopping by your local market.

Support Local

microgreens versus mature plants When buying locally, you reduce transportation costs, increase diversity in the market, and typically get higher quality, nutritious food. Fruits and full-grown vegetables in general, and baby greens in particular, are best consumed fresh. If you grow it yourself, that’s as local as it gets!

More people live in cities than ever before, making urban farmers well-positioned to provide healthy, locally grown food. And the price of most staple foods has steadily increased, so many people are willing to pay a premium for better food.

Getting started in an urban setting offers many opportunities that might not be realized at first glance. You need less land, less money, and less space to start than you might think. There are lots of benefits to farming in an urban environment.

Diverse Flavors

Whether you like spicy, sweet, crunchy, or nutty, you’ll find it in microgreens. You just need to get out there and try the different varieties for their aromatic flavor. Microgreens taste different depending on what they are. Despite the intense flavor of beet microgreens, they add a beautiful reddish hue to dishes as vegetable confetti.

There are several common types of microgreens, including arugula, beet greens, basil chard, carrots, cress, amaranth spinach, and mustard.

Super Healthy

In addition to providing a high concentration of nutrients, microgreens are also a rich source of essential vitamins and phytochemicals that can reduce disease. From a health perspective, broccoli microgreens are what we’re most interested in because it’s rich in sulforaphane which can prevent cardiovascular disease.

The fascinating health effects of freezing can be read about in the following article. Here’s the quick version:

The benefits of sulforaphane are discovered in previous studies and include:

Not only do microgreens with sulforaphane provide health benefits, but they also contain higher levels of key nutrients and mineral concentration than mature leaves or their mature counterparts.

Cost-Effective

Microgreens provide 25 times the nutritional content of mature vegetables, making the price a pretty good deal once you factor in the extra benefits.

However, you can’t just consider nutritional density, you still want a full bowl of salad or an apple in a sandwich full of microgreens. What is the most cost-effective way to consume microgreens? Growing your own is easy! Good quality seed and some high-quality soil are all you need to get started. As long as the microgreens have not developed their first true leaves, they aren’t ready to harvest, and you can serve them with or without their roots.

Sustainable

Microgreens are easy to find unstainable at first glance. Bright lights, soil, or coconut coir discarded after a harvest, ordering organic seeds that need specialized storage and shipping. Despite this, microgreens are sustainable in several ways.

A microgreen can contain 25x as much nutrition as a mature version, which means that any microgreen harvested is equivalent to 25 times as much adequate nutrition per unit of resource as a mature plant. For instance, red cabbage microgreens have 40 times the vitamin E and six times the vitamin C content of mature red cabbage.

The good news is that microgreens require very little water. An optimally-dialed-in grow can only require 5 quarts (5 liters) of water per 10″ x 20″ tray. In adult plants, water needs repeating, washing, fertilizing, and more. The water use adds up.

When buying microgreens, make sure that the packaging is compostable or recyclable, some even are. Make sure that the labels are easy to remove, difficult labels can cause recycling companies to reject the packaging. Read about a really difficult recycling situation here.

Growing Your Own

You will feel more connected to nature and your food if you grow your microgreens. As satisfying as picking a fresh cherry tomato from the garden and popping it into your mouth, microgreens give you the same feeling.

Growing microgreens builds on many of the trending values of growing food: nutritional density, origin, local, growing practices, and community impact. Microgreen farming is becoming more and more popular, even more than it is now. A great way to reconnect with friends and family is to grow microgreens and share them with your community.

Self Sufficiency

A stock of seeds allows you to grow microgreens self-sufficiently anywhere except in the most extreme climates. With or without seed starting mix and water, then you can increase your food’s nutritional punch very quickly in a couple of days, and without leaving your house.
Seeds are all you need.

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, sprouting and microgreen seeds worldwide saw a tremendous surge in demand. We found that our favorite online shops were 50-75% sold out of different sprouting and microgreen seed varieties. The easier and more popular types were all sold out.
People around the world turned to microgreens to boost their diet, and gain access to food in an emergency without going to a supermarket (without risk). This bears witness to the utility of the extra seeds in emergencies.

Even though we aren’t the very gloom-and-doom type of people, there’s an argument to be made about keeping a stock of seeds on hand and properly stored, so that you’ll be prepared for the future. The infant plants don’t just sit there and take up space. If you grow microgreens constantly, you keep your skills sharp and cycle your seed stockpile so your seeds remain fresh in the event of a future supply chain disruption. Stockpiling just a little might also be a good idea.

Final Words

Upping your nutrient intake is incredibly cost-effective with microgreens. They’re also incredibly dense in essential nutrients and beneficial plant compounds, as well as potentially reducing certain diseases. The range of textures and flavors that are available is truly incredible, as are the countless ways to incorporate them into your diet.

You may have learned something new about microgreens, tried some new varieties, or even started your own!