Time for another experiment. It occurred to me this morning that keeping a constant rotation of microgreen trays on the go is going to require a lot of compost, perhaps more than I'm able to produce, even with the worms hard at work. So I thought I'd give some 'crop rotation' a try. It's a tried and time-tested method of farmers, so I'm feeling optimistic about it. Here's what I did.
Breakfast this morning was pea shoot sandwiches, which left me with another tray of snipped shoots to process. Peas grow long and spidery root structures, that intertwine with one another when sown close together. Lift up one shoot, and a whole section of soil (sometimes the entire tray) lifts up with it, revealing a densely tangled web of roots underneath.
The standard practice for microgreen growers seems to be to just dump this in its entirety into the compost or worm bin,which makes sense, because picking out every individual seed, shaking loose the soil and preparing it for re-use is pretty tedious, and if you're working on a large enough scale, probably not necessary. Still, I thought I'd give it a go. After about ten minutes of shaking and scraping, I was left with this...
...a feast fit for a wormery, and this:
The soil was crumbly and on the dry side, so I mixed it in with another scoop of fresh compost. Normally on a tray this size I'm using four heaped trowel scoops of compost: here I only needed one to give enough overall to start a new tray. I chose adzuki beans again: fast growing, and yummy.
These have gone back onto the same shelf that I removed the previous tray of adzuki beans yesterday, and I've set a reminder for myself to harvest these and compare them to the last tray exactly one week from today. Highly scientific, I think you'll agree. If I get about the same yield, in the same time, I'm going to count this as a success. Join me again next week to see how it all works out.
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