Since yesterday's mung bean breakfast, and in the light of my little wombling epiphany this week, I've started to think more seriously about growing enough food indoors to be able to sustain myself. It's a thrilling prospect, but I need to keep my head on ground and do some actual calculations to see how possible this might be. Here goes.
Breakfast is "the most important meal of the day", so I'll start there. Yesterday I ate a tray of mung bean microgreens with some leftover chick peas. 1 cup of mung bean sprouts = 31 calories and at a rough guess I'd say a tray = 4 cups. So that's 124 calories. 1.5 cups of chick peas = 635 calories. So breakfast was 759 calories, which is about a third of a 2500 calorie a day diet (the average requirement for a male).
The chick peas weren't home grown, they came from a tin, and made up 81% of the caloric content of my breakfast. So that means I'd have to eat about five trays of mung beans for breakfast to be as nourished as I was yesterday at breakfast time. Don't much fancy that - and obviously I'm not actually going to do that anyway. It's just interesting to note.
This morning I ate the tray of adzuki beans I sowed seven days ago, also with some leftover chickpeas. (I had roasted chick peas for dinner again last night, they really are delicious - just splash with a little olive oil and roast for about 20 mins in the oven). The tray of adzuki beans looked like this:
I snipped them all off, cutting closer to the soil than I did with the mung beans yesterday, which gave me this:
I preferred the taste of these to the mung beans - milder, and "greener", more herbal in their texture. Caloric content = a mystery. I need to do some further research on this. A question to consider is whether I'm getting fewer nutrients from eating the sprouts than I would be just from eating the beans. I hope and suspect not - according to this site, sprouted adzuki beans have 300% more fibre.
 |
| The beginnings of my vertical microgreen growing experiment, which I posted about here. |
Let's say the caloric content was about the same, i.e. 124 calories per tray. If I were to live solely on microgreens (probably inadvisable, if not impossible) that would mean I would have to eat 20 trays a day to get the calories I needed. The adzuki beans and the mung beans each took seven days to grow to edible maturity, so I would need 7 x 20 trays - 140 trays - on the go at any one time to sustain myself that way. Theoretically, in the space that I have, this is possible, considering the possibilities of growing vertically.
This is boring, but also interesting at the same time. Doing the numbers can be off-putting, and there's always the danger of losing you're joy, but you have to be vigilant and think this way if you want to make any actual progress. Being able to grow all my own food in a normal-sized, one bedroom flat in England is certainly an exciting idea to me, so I'll keep going.
This morning I added another tray of adzuki beans to an area in the hall way, where yesterday I sowed another tray of mung beans, immediately after eating the first one. As some microgreen growers recommend starting your seeds off in the dark, and as I've had some interesting results varying the light levels for my pea shoots I think this is certainly worth exploring more. Plus, my hall way is long and empty (or minimalist, if that's what you're into) so there's ample space there in which I could grow things.
The key to many, perhaps most, things is variety. If you want to stay vegan, you need a variety of things to eat you actually enjoy eating regularly. If you want to be healthy generally, you need a balanced diet. If you want to be happy, you need to do different things. It's simple, but the simple is too often overlooked. Don't do the same things every day, even if they're the things you love. Do new things. Do old things in a new way. Be in company. Be alone. Be alive.
And so it is with growing your own meals. I suppose I could grow 140 trays of adzuki beans in constant rotation, but that would soon become dull and joyless, and so I would stop. Still, the dull is a good place to start. Out of the darkness and into the light, and all that jazz.
Yesterday was a great day for traffic to this blog, thanks mostly to getting this post trending on /r/anticonsumption, for which I am most grateful. Hello to any new readers: I particularly appreciate comments people have started leaving. More of that sort of thing, if you please. That's all for now, folks. Big post coming up next week about the paradoxes of minimalism. Don't forget to like, follow, share and subscribe and most of all, be happy.
Related posts
My first week as a microgreen gardener
Microgreens Week Three: Expanding My Empire
See all posts labelled 'microgreens'
Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site. I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog. So it's really nothing to be afraid of. Cheers.
Comments
Post a Comment
Your comments are welcome.