Light up the Darkness

I watched "I am Legend(imdb)" again last night, so the above quote comes from Bob Marley, through Will Smith, me, and onto you...

With Christmas guests all but a memory and my famous post-birthday-blues(2006 post) setting in, I've embarked on a number of projects to keep myself busy. Todays tidbit is on my grow-table. In the fall of 2008 a theatre friend gave us a grow-table that her father had made for her 30 or more years ago. It had been sitting unused for more than a decade and she was trying to find a good home for it.



Mission accomplished. We used it to start our garden seedlings last spring, but I thought I would try a few things earlier this year. I grabbed some soil, perlite, and plant food and got busy.

In November, garlic was really cheap. It made sense at the time to buy one of those big bags with a dozen bulbs of garlic in it. By making a lot of pizza I managed to get through most of it, but some of the bulbs began sprouting towards Christmas. I put it into the cold storage room and brought it out a couple of weeks ago.

When I went to the Police concert in Vancouver, one of my most memorable food moments was eating garlic pea-shoots and hand-pulled noodles(2007 post). Wendy has since become a fan of pea-shoots and has had me buy them a few times. They are quite expensive. considering their biomass and I am attempting to grow my own from untreated garden-pea seed. I soaked them for 24 hours and then rinse/drained them several times a day for 3-4 days.

Once well sprouted, I spread them out onto a bed of soil with a humidity cover and have misted them with water for about a week now. The websites I read as research said you could have shoots ready to eat in a week total. I can get alfalfa/quinoa sprouts in 4-5 days. But in Saskatchewan in the winter -- Even with a bank of grow lights, I think I'm looking at 2-3 weeks for pea shoots.