The Low-Tech, No-Grow-Lights Approach to Abundant Harvest
Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers good news: with nothing more than a cupboard and a windowsill, you can grow all the fresh salad greens you need for the winter months (or throughout the entire year) with no lights, no pumps, and no greenhouse.
Longtime gardener Peter Burke was tired of the growing season ending with the first frost, but due to his busy work schedule and family life, didn’t have the time or interest in high-input grow lights or greenhouses. Most techniques for growing what are commonly referred to as “microgreens” left him feeling overwhelmed and uninterested. There had to be a simpler way to grow greens for his family indoors. After some research and diligent experimenting, Burke discovered he was right―there was a way! And it was even easier than he ever could have hoped, and the greens more nutrient packed. He didn’t even need a south-facing window, and he already had most of the needed supplies just sitting in his pantry. The result: healthy, homegrown salad greens at a fraction of the cost of buying them at the market. The secret: start them in the dark.
Growing “Soil Sprouts”―Burke’s own descriptive term for sprouted seeds grown in soil as opposed to in jars―employs a method that encourages a long stem without expansive roots, and provides delicious salad greens in just seven to ten days, way earlier than any other method, with much less work. Indeed, of all the ways to grow immature greens, this is the easiest and most productive technique. Forget about grow lights and heat lamps! This book is a revolutionary and inviting guide for both first-time and experienced gardeners in rural or urban environments. All you need is a windowsill or two. In fact, Burke has grown up to six pounds of greens per day using just the windowsills in his kitchen! Year-Round Indoor Salad Gardening offers detailed step-by-step instructions to mastering this method (hint: it’s impossible not to succeed, it’s so easy!), tools and accessories to have on hand, seeds and greens varieties, soil and compost, trays and planters, shelving, harvest and storage, recipes, scaling up to serve local markets, and much more.
Product Features
- Ships from Vermont
Wish I had thought of this…but since I didn’t, I am glad Peter Burke did. Having grown my share of sprouts in mason jars (lots of rinsing; very little output + associated health risks with e.coli and salmonella) and experimented with indoor micro greens (complicated and expensive) I was delighted to discover Peter Burke’s simple soil sprout method. Follow the directions outlined in the book and you can’t go wrong; you will be harvesting ultra-fresh, delicious organic greens from your windowsill in less than 10 days. For me it is 7 or 8 days, which I think is…
Great Book! In addition to being an outdoor organic gardener for over 40 years from Central America to Alaska, I have done sprouts in jars using a rinsing method, and I have grown micro greens in winter in standard seed flat trays. Peter Burke’s soil sprouting method is infinitely superior to the jars, and it is faster in terms of usable veggies than micro greens. I suspect the result is not as nutrient dense as the micro greens, but it is clearly a very valuable growing technique since it requires much…
Great guide to growing salad sprouts I really appreciate this straightforward guide to growing your own salad green sprouts. I have wanted to grow salad greens indoors for quite a while but I didn’t want to deal with the trouble of having to set up lights and the long wait from seed to salad. I find the salad green sprouts to be the perfect fit for what I want because they grow quickly with only the light from a window. They taste delicious and are much easier to grow indoors than salad greens.This book does a great…