Nothing radicalised me like growing vegetables. Food just….comes out of the ground? And you can eat it, or share it and get more food? Our society encourages us to see everything as a zero sum game, where we’re all in competition with one another for finite money and resources, and in order for me to have more of something someone else must have less. Meanwhile with just some soil, sunshine and water plants just keep making more plants. And I can share them out to everyone around me and I’ll still have exactly the same number of plants, I haven’t lost anything and we’ve all benefitted. And the only reason more people aren’t doing this is that our systems of laws and conventions restrict access to the land to do it with, and many of us lack the time and energy to look after plants because we’re working to pay for access to the homes we rent from the people who can afford to own housing and the utilities we buy from the companies that control the supply of energy and water? I don’t understand why all allotment associations aren’t overrun with people with ripped t-shirts and alarming facial piercings ranting about the True Levellers.
Plants aren’t the only living things desperate to multiple themselves either, both times I tried worm composting my setup ended up producing enough compost worms to share out and help other people start their own wormeries and start making their own compost. Anyone cultivating a sourdough starter or brewing kombucha will know the desperate struggle to offload it as it multiplies on any friends who don’t run away fast enough when you thrust weird gelatinous blobs at them. I find it endlessly fascinating how quickly soil forms where leaves and debris accumulate in the cracks in paving or in between bricks or in gutters, and we’re constantly battling the dandelions and groundsels and buddleias that sprout up there. In a time when the news of the ongoing climate and biodiversity crisis our species has engineered is relentlessly horrifying, I find a great deal of comfort in life’s relentless drive to thrive as soon as we stop battling it and allow it.
If you have access to a balcony, a terrace or even a sunny patch of neglected and forgotten land behind one of the buildings at work, growing at least some fresh food is easier than many people think. Growing directly in soil is less work as containers need more frequent watering, but you can do a surprising amount with some pots full of compost. If your space is limited you won’t be able to make a big dent in your overall food shop so I would recommend focussing on things that are expensive to buy like salads, herbs or strawberries, or on things that taste dramatically better if harvested fresh like tomatoes or cucumbers. There are some helpful started guides linked below.
But what if you don’t have access to any outside space at all? If you have an east, south or west facing windowsill you can still grow microgreens for a least half of the year, which while they won’t contribute much volume to your diet will at least provide zesty flavours and fresh nutrients for less than the overall cost of a bag of supermarket salad and with fewer transport emissions too. Even if you don’t have access to light you can still grow beansprouts.
Allowing dried seeds to germinate and then eating the plant at the seedling stage has a long history, with the first written record coming from China in the third century. Before the year round availability of fresh produce in supermarkets, allowing dried seeds to germinate and mobilise stored nutrients would have been a great way to get some vitamins in peoples’ diets during the winter when it was too cold for crops to grow outdoors. Seeds can germinate and put out roots with just warmth and water without needing light (after all they do so outdoors) but do need light to develop healthy green leaves. Technically the former stage of roots only is referred to as sprouts and the latter with leaves as microgreens, but the terms are often used interchangeably.
I learnt to sprout seeds from an online course on windowsill gardening I took during lockdown, run by Hackney Herbal, a social enterprise which runs various wellbeing and mental health focussed courses on growing and using herbs. But you don’t even need course to get started with seed sprouting, all you need is a jar, some seeds and a cloth to cover it with. I use a piece of muslin but you can use a cut up piece of any thin natural fibre, old bedlinen for example. You can probably use synthetic fabric too, I’m just a bit concerned about microplastics, but I’d encourage you to experiment with any materials you have available to you.
If you do want to buy a bit of kit to make things a bit easier, I do actually have a seed sprouter, a series of transparent tiers that water drains through. Mine is a Biosnacky and cost about £30 but you can get unbranded cheaper ones, or it’s always worth checking eBay or Vinted for secondhand hobby type products that people may have tried out and then lost interest in a sold on for much cheaper than you would find them new. I like mine because the tiers have raised ridges on the base, reducing the number of seeds that sit in water and go mouldy, and I’m not sure if it’s officially dishwasher safe but it has been through the dishwasher with no problems. They’re also very good for sending you the little replacement caps that stop roots growing into the drainage holes between tiers if they get lost, although the downside is that the little caps are small and do get lost quite easily.
If you want to grow your sprouts onto the leafy microgreen stage they will need some light, and in a soggy overcast British winter natural light on a windowsill might not be sufficient. You can extend the growing season a little by covering some cardboard in tinfoil to make a reflector and putting it behind your sprouts to bounce the light back onto them. This also works for getting an early spring start with seedlings to plant outdoors, that would otherwise get leggy in low light, but it isn’t without risks. A fried of mine starting tomato seedlings this way had the police called on her by her neighbours, who though she was growing cannabis! If you absolutely can’t get enough natural light you can buy perfectly adequate growlights for as little as £30, which will also help you get any succulents you might have through winter.
You can buy specialist seeds sold for sprouting or microgreens in many places online or in your nearest health food shop, which will be have been tested and guaranteed to have a very high gemination percentage. You can also buy pulses like mung or adzuki beans in bulk in many Asian grocery shops, and other types of pulse and seeds like sunflower or hemp seeds in wholefood shops or online on sites like Yoyo the UK’s returnable packaging grocery shop. (Please note that this is a referral link that gets us both a £10 voucher if you place an order worth £30). You’re taking a bit more of a gamble with how old these seeds will be and what percentage of them will fail to germinate, but I’ve had very good results with grocery store pulses without needing to buy the more expensive specialist seed packets. In summary, sprouting seeds is an uncomplicated, fun and inexpensive way to get some tasty nutritious fresh salad toppings with for very little effort.
So of course someone looked at the process and thought “How can we monetise this?”
I want to start out by saying this is in no way intended as a criticism of Vegan Beauty Girl: she uses her platform to share good information about the environmental and welfare harms of industrial animal agriculture and encourage people to vote. She has subsequently done a course on container gardening without needing specialist equipment, and her job making Instagram videos probably involves going to a lot of these products launches. I put a couple of referral links for buying seeds and pulses in this post myself because a discount voucher for groceries certainly wouldn’t hurt right now, we’re all just doing our best to survive under late stage consumer capitalism.
I did initially try to give Home Harvest the benefit of the doubt, hoping that this idea might at least get some people interested in growing their own greens, and after learning that concept of a self contained sprouting unit was developed for trans Atlantic rowers, a use case that does actually makes sense, rather than as a straight up money grab. But then I learned that their cheapest unit costs £275, which I can’t see making growing accessible to anyone, and that the subscription comes with an AI assistant to give health advice. The only people not isolated in the middle of the Atlantic I can see benefiting from this are those with large amounts of money but no time to water and turn their own sprouts. And even for them I doubt it would be worth the environmental cost of replacing a simple process involving recycled and repurposed materials, requiring no electricity under the majority of circumstances, with the embodied resources involved in the construction of a custom built machine running lights, a heater and possibly filtered air to keep insects and pathogens out. It all feels a bit Juicero, the $400 machine that squeezed juice out bags of prechopped bags of fruit and vegetables sold on subscription slightly less efficiently than a person could manage by squeezing them by hand.
Just as landlords enclosed English common land in the 16th century, claiming ownership of what had been a communal resource and requiring peasant farmers to pay them to rent it back, AI appears to be in the process of enclosing information, ingesting everything written and created and shared on the internet on spewing it back shorn of context, meaning or personality. Google search is trying to replace links to websites with attributable information sources made by people who care about what they’re creating with AI summaries in response to search queries. These may be accurate, or may be dangerously inaccurate, but that doesn’t matter to Google because it’s profitable for their business model. I’ve no doubt this post will be scraped and regurgitated back by some chatbot, possibly to someone who’s being rinsed by Home Harvest every month to get nutritional advice on sprouting seeds. And I haven’t even mentioned the environmental footprint of AI datacentres (which use 6% of the UK’s electricity supply) or the fact that these companies have created a computer memory shortage by buying it all up, driving up the price of IT equipment and forcing users to rent hosting and computing power back from them at a profit. The entire business model is enclosure of every public good the modern day feudal lords can get their grubby little hands on.
We’re sold things like overcomplicated hundred pound sprouting machines because we believe we need access to specialist equipment like this and expertise we can’t possibly hope to acquire to do simple things like sprouting seeds or making compost or baking bread or growing vegetables, when actually what’s stopping us is lack of access to space to do it or time and energy because we’re constantly working to survive. And the people who have enclosed our means of survival so they can get rich by renting or selling it back to us are quite happy for us to continue believing it. So shove some beans in a jar, share plants, share knowledge, share food, the skills are probably more accessible than you think.
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 