Microgreens diary & mcn
2020-08-22 16:19, 5 months ago
I’ve been developing a system to monitor, track & orchestrate indoor farming on and off
for the last year. It’s been going pretty well & I’m almost at the point where I can
start developing the hardware to work with it, it’s open-source and anyone can create devices, but
I’ll need a few to test it out - obviously.
There comes a time though when you need to do some practical work - I’ve never grown much of anything in my whole life, so some experience in how it all works will aid me in developing the system. My farm consists of 1 level with a 300-800nm spectrum grow light, for bigger veggies like lettuces and 4 levels with red&blue strip LEDs for microgreens.
Growing pea shoots
Step 1: Soaking the seeds
I bought some trays from AliExpress to do soil-less growing & filled the whole thing with pea shoot seeds - totally way too much as you’ll see later;
All in, this was about 200g
unsoaked. These were then soaked in a bowl of water for around 15 hours.
Step 2: Germination
After allowing the seeds to soak, they had grown to be pretty much double in size,
mine weighed 397g
post soak - I then evenly distributed the seeds in the tray and covered the
tray so the seeds were in total darkness. Every few hours I lightly misted the seeds with water.
Do this for 2 days.
Since the seeds grew so much they far exceeded the single trays capacity, so I had to split them over two trays - seeing as I had two sets of lights (white & red/blue) I did a little experiment to see what the difference would be in growth.
Step 3: Growing up
After about 2 days of blackout, I uncovered the seeds and exposed them to light for ~18hrs a day.



It seems as if the pea shoots were more ‘leggy’ under the red/blue light, but that may just be due to how close the plants were relative to the lights, I couldn’t really tell any noticeable difference in taste though. My final yield is as follows:
- red/blue: input:
129g
, output:78g
, io ratio:0.604
- white: input:
268g
, output:178g
, io ratio:0.664
All in all the pea shoots only took 10-ish days from seed to harvest, so definitely possible to put on rotation for an unlimited supply. I eventually plan to step up production to use all 5 levels & sell these at the local farmers market. 🌱